Why Do So Many Belgian Abbey Breweries Also Make Cheese?

Spend enough time exploring Belgian abbey breweries and a pattern begins to emerge. Alongside the beer, there is very often cheese.

Chimay makes it. So do Orval and Westmalle. Maredsous is almost as closely associated with its cheese as with its beer. It might look like an unusually successful exercise in food pairing, but the real explanation runs rather deeper.

For many monastic communities, work has long gone hand in hand with prayer. The traditional Benedictine idea of "ora et labora" — prayer and work — places productive labour at the heart of monastic life.

Abbeys also needed to feed themselves, maintain their buildings and support their communities. Many worked agricultural land, raised livestock and produced food: making things was both practical and part of a self-sufficient way of life.

Beer and cheese fitted rather well.

Grain could be brewed into beer. Perishable milk could be turned into cheese that would keep longer, mature and provide something to sell. Both required skill, patience and controlled production — qualities for which settled monastic communities were rather well equipped.

The tradition developed differently from abbey to abbey.

At Westmalle, cheese remains directly tied to the abbey farm: it is made within the monastery from milk produced by the abbey's own cows. Orval has made cheese at the abbey since 1928, using a recipe developed in 1816 by Trappist monks at Port-du-Salut in France.

Chimay took an especially deliberate approach. In 1876, Brother Benoît was sent to France to learn how to make semi-firm cheese. The abbey had begun brewing only fourteen years earlier, and beer and cheese became parallel parts of its efforts to support the monastery and the surrounding region.

That link with the surrounding countryside survives today: Chimay's cheesemaking still begins with locally collected milk.

Look beyond beer and cheese and the bigger picture becomes clearer. Trappist and other monastic communities have produced bread, honey, jam, biscuits, chocolate, wine, liqueurs and plenty more besides.

Even the familiar Authentic Trappist Product label isn't a beer classification. Qualifying products other than beer can carry it too: Westmalle's cheeses, for example, have ATP certification.

Beer isn't the exception and cheese isn't really the coincidence.

Beer and cheese simply became two particularly successful expressions of it — especially in Belgium, where several abbeys became exceptionally good at both.

The fact that they also happen to go extremely well together feels less like the explanation and more like a rather fortunate bonus.