St Bernardus: from Westvleteren contractor to Belgium’s best brewery? | The Craft Beer Channel

Brad and Jonny visit one of their favourite traditional Belgian breweries, and find a modern and vibrant place with a stunning ROOF TERRACE and of course some of the best Abbey-style beers they’ve ever tasted.

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hey bigs and welcome to one of the most incredible breweries we have ever visited on the channel just look at where we are how idilic is this Rose and rows of beautiful hops gorgeous Countryside and we’re looking at it from the roof Terrace of St bernardis Brewery Brewers of some of the best Belgian beers ever made some of my favorite beers ever made and it’s a brewery with an incredible story with great links to St 6us or west veteran brewing and Travis monasteries even further back and today we’re going to be telling you that story tasting some incredible beers and exploring this phenomenal Brewery it’s absolutely blown my mind making this video Welcome to watu and welcome to some [Music] bernardis my Belgian standard s bernardis is a pretty young Brewery but they’ve packed a lot into their 70-year history including being a a cheese factory Brewing the original westan 12 nearly going out of business and finally building what has to be one of the most incredible and unexpected breweries we’ve ever visited it’s like a bond villain there Brad and I have been longtime lovers of all their beers but unusually for us we hadn’t really given a second’s thought to the brewery or the people behind them when we realized we’d be passing by on another project we decided to make a film and it’s one of the best decisions we’ve made on the channel not only is this a remarkable place to be making old school Abby inspired belgia ale it’s a remarkable place to drink in it’s hard to think of a more modern Brewery or tap room but equally hard to think of a more traditional beer range in approach but it’s that tension between young and old that makes St bernardis great as you’re about to find out starting with a history lesson in the Brewer’s Visitor Center so the story as with so many of these breweries here in Belgium is that so it starts with a monastery so it was a monastery actually in France uh the monks there fled uh potentially for tax reasons maybe for safety as well they fled pretty much to where we’re standing today a couple of hundred meters away and they founded a monastery which they were funding by making cheese now eventually these monks most of them went back to France once things had calmed down and they left behind this cheese business which was bought by an entrepreneur who started or continued to make the cheap now what happened was since Sixers which is a couple of miles away from here they decided they wanted uh to start brewing their own beers they decided they wanted to brew it just for themselves but they still wanted uh to make money from it for the upkeep of the mon so they contracted this guy our cheese entrepreneur to make the beer for them and that is kind of where this Brewery starts so that contract actually lasted all the way up to 1992 so all of the recipes that some arst have or many of them came from that era and were in fact sort of since six dis Spear and you can see that in the bottles that we’ve got you can see the development of the brand uh of these Trappist beers developing through the years and once you get to this point around the 19 late 1950s you’ll start to recognize it as much as St bernardis as you would St 6us so that continues that continues all the way up to 1992 which is a dark day for the brewery uh the the Trappist monasteries of of Belgium and around the world decide that to be an authentic Trappist product it has to be made by the monks and within the walls of the Monas all the rules that we know that are associated with this badge so that of course meant that and bernardis could no longer produce the beers and still call it a Trappist beer so the West veteran uh monks or the and sixth monks I should say brought that back in house the founding of the modern West veteran Brewery where they still Brew it today but actually with West Mal East interestingly enough so this was a dark day for the brewery their entire volume disappeared overnight but they had the rights to the recipes so it was more a case of them needing to reinvent themselves but that took a little while that was very hard to do obviously the love was there for the the monks beer that was essentially six years of of trying to Rebrand itself until Hans comes along who owns the brewery today he bought it in 1998 he turned it around he focused more on keg beer he brought in some new more modern recipes within a couple of years and started to build what we have here now this is the brewery tour it’s an absolutely incredible thing I’ve never been on a bur tour like it and I’ve been to Guinness ANH Hower Bush all of these it’s an incredible setup that they’ve put together and now we’re going to have a little look around and learn a bit more about the [Music] Brey so you can see since six this up top in fact no mention of sun Bernard is here but you can see here s Bernard just beneath uh The Abbey since is here right at the bottom you goton bernardes and that really starts to switch even when they’re still making the beer you can even see like the name of the road that we’re on is trapist and V and that would have come from back then when the monastery was on this road or the French monks the original French monks that’s why it’s got that name but of course it’s no longer Trappist monastery and you know this is not a Trappist Brewery they make Trappist inspired Styles and whip [Music] Biz right so this is the room that talks about the beers so obviously this is the flagship it’s the 12 it’s one of the best beers in the world it is in fact the original recipe of West valeta and 12 this is still the same recipe that they brewed way back in 1946 obviously with some process changes but what you know what’s written on the page is is essentially still still the same you can see the growth of recipes as the market changed so then we get the triple coming in 1990 so that was still under the control of the S6 monks and then we get to one of the first beers introduced once hands on the brewery in 2002 so we got a whip beer if you may remember from this the summer of the early 2000s wh beer was getting cool hog Garden was everywhere um so that’s probably where that came from that OB started in Belgium um so that’s why that came out as an attempt also as a lower ABV option by the way we’re going to talk about this with Marco later but it is confirmed every thousand bottles have a winking Monk and there’s an awesome story behind that we got to get through the door we got to get get through the door before it closes so we’ve now entered the Brewing area of The Crystal Maze this is the old Brew House in its original situ it’s about to kick off this story these tanks are about to start talking in my earphones here so this is where it originally was this is still in situe you can see you got the mash done here this for the runoff to check the clarity the gravity stuff like that and then this Ste vessel would be the boiler not enough dry ice in craft brewes I tell [Music] you so this is a little peek through to the new brew house which we’ll have a look at in a [Music] sec so you can see through here this is the fermentation so this Brewery makes about 50,000 just over 50,000 hect a year which when you’re talking about Sun beers that are 10% that’s a lot of the fermentation to happen uh and that’s all happening through here in these big big stainless steel tanks no interactive brewery tour is complete without a little scratch and sniff so uh from this we have to guess guess what it is that’s coriander [Music] coriander so this is all automated state-of-the-art brewing for vessel system cranking out 50,000 hect a year of absolutely giant beer but as you can see it’s fully automated now that’s the control where they’re doing it although you can see they still got manway so the hots will be going in by hand they’re taking gravity readings pH readings all that kind of stuff down at the Brewer station so it’s a mix you know which is I think where the best beer is made when it’s hands on but it’s also automated to make things easier for the Brewers so they can focus on the important stuff thank you Star Trek door kind of plywood Star Trek so this is a clock that’s trying to tell us the time is very very important in brewing in particular in Belgium Brewing if you’re going to bottle condition your beer so where most Brewers would have a cold room where they keep the beers really cold that’s the best place uh for particularly hoppy beers and lgers to be you have lots of warm rooms in Belgian Brewers and some British Brewers where they’re helping the refermentation it’s at about 20 21° so that you get carbonation in the bottle and that is what the clock the clock is trying to tell us and here is the giant bottling line I’d love to tell you how many bottles come through every minute I don’t know but it’s Lots so all the bottles that come in are being clean that have been out there in the trade then we get to filling so that’s what this big whirly gig is doing so the be are all being filled really weirdly of course the beer is flat there’s a tiny bit of carbonation in there but there’s not a huge amount because that’s going to be added in the bottle so through here is that warm room I told you about so this is where the beer goes once it’s packaged to sit there for a couple of weeks get that refermentation in Bottle which adds character to the beer natural fermentation lovely soft fine bubbles which means that you can have lots of carbonation like we have in Belgian beers without it being too much um so that’s why they do that and why it takes a lot more time and why they need a lot of storage in this place but yeah this is the warm room where the beers will be stored and just through there as well to get cars should we exit through the gift shop I think we should exit through the [Music] gift [Music] it’s not an entirely unique experience to see traditional beer going through a state-of-the-art kit we’ve seen countless breweries in Germany the UK and indeed Belgium but the fact that so much of it has happened since the late 1990s is pretty unusual to learn the story of what happened after the trauma of s bernardas losing its contract with West veterin we had a beer with Marco pasera he joined the brewery when it was perhaps at its lowest point Marco thank you so much for having us it’s incredibly exciting to be here having been a huge huge fan of this particular beer for a decade at least welcome um why don’t we crack it open and maybe tell me the the history of this amazing place so uh we’re drinking Sun Berard is app 12 I guess you guys have visited the brewery a little bit uh well today we have this is the first time so this was I was like a child in the back of the car on the way over yeah just so excited so I don’t know if you noticed the first thing that that’s kind of strange from our Brewery is the fact that you pour our beer with the glass on the table and just slowly pour it and make sure that you get a nice thick uh Foye so no tilting the glass or lifting it or anything you want that explosion yeah we want that explosion of uh so that’s why our glass is actually 62 cener full huh you made it bigger to have that head yes if you ever come across it uh in a pub and they pour it to the rim then you’re drinking a pint or more or more which you need to know when it’s this beer uh you need to know yes yes yes it’s kind of a deceiving beer it’s a 10% one so yeah absolutely so Cheers Cheers welcome to the brewery thank you very much so so this was this is based on and very close to a 1946 recipe is that right we got this is uh basically it’s the same beer that we started brewing in 1946 back in the days when uh uh MAA fransy the brew master of West Lan came over here to the brewery uh to start brewing here you have to know that uh we were asked by the Trappist monks of West vatan being a cheese factory before that we were asked by them do you want to commercialize or beer mhm and uh because the the owner of the cheese factory and the the the Abbott of West veteran they were friends playing cards together card playing card card playing monks right okay and um so uh the the the monks didn’t want to commercialize their own beer anymore and they gave a license to us to prove for for them under license um and we started doing that back in 1946 for a period of in total 46 years up until 1992 uh when our license came to an end uh but actually we still Brew the same beer with the same recipe and with the same yeast strain uh uh then than back then the only thing that really changed is the name of our beer and uh the fact that uh our beer is not a trais beer anymore uh it’s now an Abby beer uh which is also strange because after us they also uh implemented another uh authentic uh logo and that was for the Abby beers and we not an authentic Abby beer either because know there was an Abby designation yeah there’s an Abby designation as well and uh there to to get that you need to have a bond with an Abby and ours is a two Trappist monasteries the one making cheese just across the border in France called muts and the other one West Von but we don’t have an actual Bond right now with them so we were not able to uh to to be even an Abby beer so but those those Marcs aren’t about the quality of the beer it’s more I guess not I guess not trapist beer is not it doesn’t stand for a type of beer it stands for the fact that it’s brewed uh by the trist monks inside the walls uh and supervised by the monks and they had to wait uh until our license came to an end in 1992 to implement that idea so in 1992 they they took their production in house which left you I guess not with like sort of no production anymore you were still making the beers but you just had to Rebrand suddenly yeah we we rebranded them and uh actually what happened was that uh the monks became a little bit our competitors at that time because they started selling for themselves again and you could you could go and buy the crates of beer at their door yeah but they limited the production so uh you know we were still selling a fair amount of beer but it was very difficult to grow uh so in the first let’s say in the first from 92 till maybe 98 uh it was uh a little bit dark and gloomy over here because they were also looking for somebody to take over the brewery so because they were looking for somebody to buy The Brewery from them they didn’t invest anymore mhm so when hunt the paper came came over to to buy it in ’92 he found a brewery that was a little bit uh uh uh run run out out run down run down sorry run out okay it was run down and we had to do some Investments and make sure that we could uh um that we could uh you know be ready for the future again and Hans thought that he would have a small investment and then everything would be perfect again but actually since 19 uh 98 until now uh 25 years later uh we haven’t stopped investing all all the money that we made with the brewery right okay so all back we have grown a lot since you know I mean so when we were driving here we were coming down the road I saw this sort of big industrial looking building and I was like that can’t be the brewery it’s too big and then as we pulled up and I started to see like the shape of the roof test I was like oh wow this is this is well I’ve seen the brewery grow a lot too over the past uh 20 years I’ve been here 20 years since 2004 so yeah and and tell me about your rival cuz you you said earlier that they didn’t really talk about it the history that they they had when when I arrived here in uh 2004 uh I found a brewery that that that I never heard about I I live uh I live 30 30 kilomet from here I never heard about it I didn’t know the story I didn’t nobody have had ever told me about a brewery brewing a beer for West leeran that was that was crazy I never heard about that so and I’m I live pretty nearby in C so I I I was I was nobody in the area knew a lot about it and I thought uh that it was important to to start telling our history so I mean it feels like that that history would be partly why say he loved the brand and and should have been something the Brewers very proud of why why didn’t they talk about it was I guess I found out that uh definitely Mr Claus Mr G who were who lost lost the uh the license uh uh he he didn’t like to talk about it because he felt like it was something that was taken away from him almost like uh like he lost a child and he didn’t want to talk about it anymore it was very it was like a big taboo to talk about it here yeah I mean it must have been a real shock and a real loss to the brewery but equally then it’s allowed you to over 25 years start to create what you have here yeah I guess um slowly but surely we started building uh our name for us a name for ourselves again and we did that by uh uh um the four most important things to that I think the four more most important things to sell beer are quality Quality quality go on and a good story right so if you don’t have a good story you can talk about your how long can you talk about beer you guys have done it a lot now but yeah about 500 videos how how long can you talk about beer at a certain point you have to taste it and then the taste speaks so much more than all the words you UT MH so you want people to try it you want people to to try it and fall in love with it and I guess that’s what happened in the past many people try it they think I think sometimes people think that our Monk on the label it looks a little bit oldfashioned and am I going to like this it’s a dark beer I’m not a dark Beer Drinker I don’t like beer people people go a lot like this yeah then I tell them if you don’t like beer you’re definitely going to love this one because if you don’t like beer probably you don’t like the the over iish or the you don’t like the acidity and the Finish or you don’t like you don’t like things that you associate with beer but this is this is an exceptional beer that that is so smooth and silky it pleases a lot of Bordeaux drinkers people who like red wine so I try to over the years I’ve Tred to convince person per person to to try your beer and once they try it I guess a lot of times they fall in love with it and they stick with it and you so since since parting ways with with since 60s you’ve released a couple of new beers such as the the whip beer yes um was that that was an attempt to sort of say to is that sort of seen as a more modern style for guess first the first beer that we brought uh brought after that uh the monks we didn’t Brew for them anymore it’s called sard triple with the green label that everybody here in the area called calls bernardet bernardet is the name of the owner of the previous owner of the Brewer and she liked to drink uh s Berard trle and therefore everybody started going after so if you want to be local here you don’t go to the pub and say Hey can I have two s Bernard triples please but you say can I have two bernardes so if I go upstairs and and say that oh then they’re going to love you they’re going to love you they’re going to be like oh he he’s either local or he knows a lot about or just interviewed Marco yeah Marco yeah oh that’s possible to yes yes yes yes but but to come back on what you said about a wet beer uh yes we tried to add some beers to our range just to make because we had we only had dark beers at the beginning right and we had a we had a a four we had a six an eight and a 12 but they were all dark beers right now we have a we have a four again after so many years we started making that in 2014 uh it’s a single so I have a single a double a triple and a quadruple and the single is not but it’s not the same recipe anymore at you as it used to be but it’s now a blonde beer so blonde beer 4.8% so like the West m extra that everybody the table beer the rafter beer we say here the beer that that that the monks drink when they are uh having lunch so they don’t have to drink up 12 12 or dark beers or strong beers all the time they’ve got more sense than us yeah you referenced the the monk earlier and this is It’s considered an urban legend that the monk Winks it is not it’s true it is true yes I started doing that uh in uh 07 I think 0708 and uh I thought uh I wanted to make some publicity for the brewery but we didn’t have any budgets all the money went into the brewery so there was no money for uh big publicities but I thought if I would make a some nice joke on the label maybe people will pick it up and it would become an urban legend which it has but now since you’re we’re telling it on your on to the people then uh it’s not a legend anymore now everybody’s going to know it well it’s also on your tour as well so I heard the story you didn’t even tell Hans that you were doing it no we we did I didn’t tell Hans about it uh I didn’t tell anybody about it the only the only guy who knew was the guy who was on the bottling line so you have to know when you when we buy uh labels they come in packs of 1,000 so I told him just every pack of 1,000 when you put it in the feeder uh uh just put one of these behind it and he said what is this one I said well the monk Winks at you and he looked at it and he says do you think Hans uh won’t oppose with it I said we’re not going to tell him just just do it and he started doing it for many years every time uh like every week every other week he would tell me do I still have to do it are you sure so I had to reconvince him to keep on doing it and so we kept on doing that and the uh uh eventually some people found out and saw it and then it became like a really nice it’s free publicity this Brewery we haven’t even talked about how incredible this place is like I’d seen the photos on the website I’d had some friends in Belgium say how wonderful it is but nothing quite prepares you for um not just not just the roof Terrace not just the tour but also like the space we’re in the event space the Hops back which I’m told some of them are Golding so I nailed it yes Golding yes yes yes um two colors actually I don’t know if you can distinguish oh so there’s a dividing line yeah dividing line it’s right where we are so on left say dividing Bine oh so it’s HTO Magnum and K Golding right yeah nice and all of this goes into your Brew so these all of this plus extra because this is this field has been built in 2010 and we have multiplied sales by since then yeah it it has become a lot bigger MH you mentioned your quality Quality quality good story but you know the Belgian Beer Market must be incredibly saturated especially with the styles that you make these you know traditional Abbey trappy style beers what what’s been the key to that that growth I think uh well first of all um for me it was very important to continue to grow in Belgium uh because a lot of breweries were small like we were they try to only go to export but I want to have Roots first and then uh spread our wings uh so it’s for me it’s very important that if people visit gent bruge uh Brussels ANP or any place in Belgium that they should be able to find or beer mhm because otherwise they’re going to be like so I thought this Brewer this Brewery that I really love and and I drank a lot of it in my area now that I come to Belgium I can’t find it anywhere so we wanted to prevent that and that’s why we we try to grow a lot in Belgium uh we we made a lot of new customers on draft so we definitely in the area here we sponsored some music festivals and uh we we reached a lot of younger people by that a lot of older people knew us already M but we reached a lot of younger people so nowadays here in the area when when when when any youngster goes out either he drinks a A pser or he will drink uh good beer and then he drinks uh bernardet or an app 12 and look for the Winking monk I think that’s interesting like you know when I was getting into beer which would have been around about 2010 s bernardis was one of those Brewers that was always record to recommended to me as like a a great Belgian Brewery to to sort of start your Belgian beer Journey on as well and that must have been very important to to your brand as well as being this you know incredibly high quality but also quite introductory brand I guess it’s so representative of so much what Happ app 12 is the is a is not a difficult beer to drink it’s not a I mean it’s not you know if if your first beer ever is going to be uh OD yeah uh you know that’s that that it has more uh you need some more time to learn to appreciate that and uh I guess this is very very accessible and it’s not so difficult uh to love this or to to like it uh it has a certain sweetness to it it it doesn’t taste like 10% beer no so you could like be fooled by it I guess I think it’s lots of familiar flavors as well like sort of raisins and dates and lovely sweet things that almonds maybe yeah definite kind of nothing to it as well and caramels and you know it’s it’s a really familiar almost kind of beer even if it’s the first time you sort of drink it and I find that with quite a few Belgian quads um and if we’ve been sitting here a while and as as it warms up there’s even more Esters that are released so if you uh this is a beer to enjoy you know it’s not something that you would you want to drink fast you want to uh you want to let it sit for a while and when when the first por is you drink it uh fresh let’s say you drink it cool cooler and then it if it warms up it opens the pallet and yeah it’s even more it’s even better it’s even better the more you drink it which has nothing to do with the 10% alcohol as well which just oh yeah maybe maybe maybe a little bit too but uh yeah yeah well it’s been a pleasure talking to you this is one of the most beautiful well put together Brews I’ve ever been to and the beer as I knew it would be before I arrived is fantastic well I’m very glad that you liked your visit and uh I hope you’re going to make something nice of this oh it’s we can’t fail to with how beautiful the brewery is and how it’s been put together so thank you I’ll Drink To That Cheers Cheers clearly Marco’s approach of humorous marketing and serious business has helped turn the brewery around but you have to keep coming back to the stunning nature of the beers each and everyone is an icon in its style bettered by only a handful of others if any Brad and I ordered a few more and sat down on the roof Terrace to try and sum up what we’d experienced so I expected the beer to be good I also expected a roof Terrace but I think my expectations were way off it’s incredible here as I said off camera it’s like a bond villain lair in its scope magnitude fortifications I reckon out of the old vessels that’s where the missiles come out yeah yeah yeah yeah 100% it’s I mean like we’re we’re we’re being G but it’s one of the most uh beautiful breweries I’ve ever been to stylish incredibly stylish architect designed everything yeah in real contrast to like a very classic I mean but still you know it’s got this Modern Edge and I think that kind of defines some bananas it’s like incredibly classy and modern but with this sort of heart that goes back a long way yeah I think I think this the beautiful different distinct Place they’ve created here it’s all a product I think of the adversity that they’ve had to face along the way right so they had their their state of stripped away from them they were incredibly exposed they were such a small Brewery at that point as well and I think they were at a point in time where they could have just evaporated but they Rose to the challenge and they kind of had to think outside the box and I think that that has gone into the beer that we’re we’re drinking today and the sort of you know the environment they’ve I mean I think you know it’s obviously very tough in the Belgian Beer Market all beer markets and to see the amount of money that’s been put into this Brewery is perhaps the only way to do it you know to to make sure that you do modernize even if you don’t want to touch the recipes or or anything like that like you don’t have to modernize the the liquid you’re producing you can modernize everything El around so that you can go and drink beautiful traditional beers in a space that you know feels as modern and as exciting as any kind of modern Craft brewery and that that’s a real contradiction to some extent but it just work so beautifully when it’s done right like here I think you can pick this up with with the hot field attached right yeah and you can stick this in New Zealand you could stick this in somewhere in California wherever and it’s it’s going to be cutting edge mhm exciting destination kind of place yeah I’m so I’m so blown away by it I was kind of speechless and I kind of ran out of ways to tell them every time we met a new employee and they were like what do you think we’re like we just just cannot explain how amazing this place is it is really very very special and very surprising um so if you have a car or you’re very good on a bike make sure you come uh to see some bernardis you know you can drink it in a in a beautiful fusty Brugge bar like we did last night or you can come to this incredible modern Oasis of hoppy yeasty calmness it’s it’s that that’s it right it’s there’s a calmness to this place we’re in a tranquil environment but it it’s it’s very respectful of where we are it doesn’t I don’t think it sits heavy on the land I think it adds to to where we are Johnny it’s it’s a wonderful phrase to finish on doesn’t sit heavy on the land but the Abbott 12 still sits heavy on my mind the [Music] next [Music] oh