St. Bernardus Brewery

St. Bernardus is the Watou brewery whose quadrupel, Abt 12, descends directly from one of the world's most coveted beers: for 46 years it brewed the Trappist ales of nearby Saint-Sixtus abbey — the Westvleteren beers — under license, using the abbey's recipes and its yeast. When that arrangement ended, the recipes stayed in Watou, and St. Bernardus kept brewing them under its own name.

The site began as a monastic refuge. Monks from the Mont des Cats abbey, pushed out of France by anti-clerical laws in the late nineteenth century, settled in Watou and supported themselves making cheese. In 1946 the Saint-Sixtus abbey licensed the operation to brew and sell its beers commercially, and Westvleteren's brewmaster Mathieu Szafranski joined as a partner, bringing the recipes, the know-how and the house yeast strain.

The license, extended in 1962, ran out in 1992, when the Trappist designation was restricted to beers brewed inside abbey walls. St. Bernardus relaunched the range under its own label with Abt 12 at the top — a beer cut from the same cloth as Westvleteren 12 and far easier to find. The brewery remains independent, and Watou, a hop-growing village on the French border, remains its home.

Abt 12 is dark chestnut with a creamy head; raisin, date and banana-clove yeast notes ride a plush malt body into a warm, softly sweet, very long finish — a benchmark quadrupel at around 10%.