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Benedictine Brewery By Brenna Wiegand One hundred volunteers – the majority monks and seminarians – gathered Nov. 11 on a gentle slope below Mount Angel Abbey to raise the frame for the Abbey’s new brewery and tap room. Benedictine Brewery is expected to bring a much-needed revenue stream and a way to share Abbey life with others. It also restores a 1,500-year-old monastic tradition of beer brewing rarely seen in the States.
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“This was an area we’ve been wanting to get into for a long time; European monks have been brewing beer for well over 1,000 years,” Father Martin Grassel, Abbey Procurator and brew master said. “The oldest continuously operating brewery in the world is a Benedictine brewery in Europe coming up on 1,000 years. I believe the oldest existing plan for a brewery is from a monastery back in the first millennium.” In the Middle Ages, Benedictine monasteries supplied beer to the locals
because you couldn’t drink the water and breweries became part of the character of European monasteries. “The Pacific Northwest is just a great brewing region and Mount Angel has a Bavarian heritage; and the town has German origins,” Grassel said. “It’s all very Germanic and we just feel like it’s part of our own heritage to be in the beer business.” Another thing handed down from ancient monasteries is the spirit of self-sufficiency. “Monasteries should be as self-supporting as possible,” Grassel said. “It’s like a little town.” “If we didn’t think it was going to make some money we wouldn’t be doing it because I don’t want another operation you have to raise money for,” Grassel said. “Libraries and schools don’t make money and we expect the brewery to help support us or at least break even.” The entire project is already a lesson in self-sufficiency. Not only is the beer made
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