Amsterdam - day 3 - La Trappe

Most of the day Sunday was spent at the only Trappist brewery outside of Belgium. La Trappe is brewed at the B.V.M. Koningshoeven Abbey outside of Tilburg, in the south of the Netherlands.

It was a 2 hour train ride, so we got an early start. As I mentioned before, we were staying in the red light district - and they really do use red lights to gate the district:


We made our way to the Amsterdam Central station and enjoyed a nice ride to Tilburg:





Once in Tilburg, we needed to take a bus to the monastery, which was maybe 20 minutes away:



The buildings and grounds of the monastery were quite impressive:






Pete had a connection who arranged a private tour of the brewery for us. We arrived a half hour before our 11:AM tour time, but there was a misunderstanding at the brewery. They thought we were going to Sunday service first. Since we were skipping mass, we had a beer and some lunch in their hospitality room (that's their excellent beef stew below, which was long on meat and short on stew) while we waited for our tour guide to be located:



Toon (our tour guide) found us about 12:30 and led us on a tour of the grounds and the brewery itself. The beer was first produced in the sheep shed (see below photo) and called "sheep shed" beer, but they changed their name to a less earthy sounding "La Trappe" when they decided to expand their operation and their reach to other countries:


The quaint copper tanks originally used for brewing have been replaced by modern stainless steel ones:



And industrial robots bottle and package most of the beer, with monks performing these roles only for special and ceremonial brews. Still, the monks must be involved in the production of the beer for it to be called a Trappist beer:


A new endeavor for the brewery is beer aged in oak barrels:


After the tour, we headed back to their hospitality room (in a sheep shed style building) for a tasting of the 6 beers they produce. By our sixth beer (along with the beers we had before the tour), we were pretty much done with Trappists beers for this trip:


A serendipitous moment happened when we met the new export manager for La Trappe in the hospitality room as we were finishing up our tasting. He was able to tell us the history of the beer and its relationship with Bavaria (the partner company that brews and bottles the beers to the Trappist monks' recipes - and the company he was leaving for La Trappe), and the changing palates of beer drinkers, and where he thought the beer market was heading. It was a very cool day (figuratively and literally).