The Abbay of Saint Sixtus of Westvleteren
The Church of the Customer blog has an interesting piece about a religious order of silent monks and how they sell their beer. I’m not as interested in the ‘niche marketing’ aspect as I am the ‘niche culture’ aspect of the requirements these people place on themselves and others for acquiring this beverage. An interesting aspect of this is that these monks prohibit the resale of their beer. If you think you’ve found a source for this beer other than directly from this abbay then you are either looking at a counterfeit or at someone who has agreed not to re-sell the beer and then done so anyway. I certainly would love to try this this stuff but I think my wife would have some reservations about me hoping a plane to Belgium to buy a beer.
Articles like this open up a whole world of possibilities in my mind. How many other monastic orders, artistic enclaves, or other small groups of people organized around some principal or goal are producing unique things for consumption? Also, is it entirely possible that these monks have always sold their beer this way and that it has just become anachronistic to my sensibilities because of cultural or temporal divide? I wonder if at one time beer sold this way was just the way things were done and it only looks strange and cool to me because of my perspective.