for those who don't wnat to sign up to the NYT, here is the interesting Chimay article:
CHIMAY, Belgium, Jan. 10 — With his billowing white beard and black and white hooded habit, Dom Armand Veilleux, a Canadian-born monk in his mid-60's, more resembles a figure from Umberto Eco's novel of monastic mystery, "The Name of the Rose," than your average brewery executive.
Yet just across a snow-dusted garden from the room where he receives visitors, a microbrewery throbs, its six huge stainless steel vats fermenting more than 13,000 gallons of beer a day.
Only five years ago, the Trappist Abbey of Our Lady of Scourmont, where Dom Armand has been abbot for almost five years, turned out 15 percent less. But these days, Belgian Trappist beers — heavy brews, often dark and with as much as 9 percent alcohol — are surging in popularity, spreading blessings on the hilly farmland around Chimay, pop. 10,000, traditionally one of the poorer Belgian lands that snuggle against the French border.
Today the brewery that Scourmont controls, Bières de Chimay, with 72 employees, is the area's largest employer. Last year, Chimay generated revenues equivalent to $21 million, up from $17 million in 1995.
A new low-slung headquarters building was inaugurated last year a 20-minute drive from the abbey's gray stone buildings; the sales staff was increased to seven, from three, and 12 more workers were hired for bottling and brewing.
Recently, limits to production and sales that the abbey imposes were lifted slightly to accommodate increasing demand.
Still, Dom Armand insists with a chuckle, "We're not out to beat Interbrew," the big Belgian brewery that competes with the likes of Anheuser-Busch and Heineken for global dominance. "Quality has to be first — quality in the product, and in the working conditions, in relations among people."
Indeed, five years ago, the abbey's business affairs were separated out under the umbrella of two foundations that reinvest the profits in charitable works and the development of local business. To maintain control, the board of each business consists of three monks and two lay people.
"The brewery pays us rent, and all the profits are redistributed," said Dom Armand, a thoroughly modern monk who designed the abbey's Web site. "We own the brand name — Bières de Chimay — and they pay us a licensing fee."
Traditionally, Trappists support themselves by farming and light industry. They also produced and sold cheese and took in paying visitors at a small guesthouse. Over the years, the number of monks dwindled. Now, there are 22, including seven from affiliates in Africa.
At Scourmont, the monks began brewing beer in 1862, a dozen years after the abbey was founded. It is only one of six Belgian Trappist monasteries brewing beer, including the abbeys of Rochefort, Westmalle, Westvleteren, Orval and Achel. But today, at Scourmont at least, none of the monks actually work in the brewery.
Instead, they spend their days in prayer, singing the liturgical office at set hours, and working, mainly organizing spiritual retreats for visitors. They also still toil on the 1,500 hilly acres that surround the abbey, raising cattle and grains (though not their own hops, which come from Germany and Washington State).
But while the monks may aspire to poverty, the product made at their abbey is pure luxury. A 750-milliliter bottle of Chimay can sell for $9 in New York, positioning it somewhere between beer and wine. "There's a certain cachet, more like wine," said Beth Rogers, the general manager of Markt, an upscale West Village restaurant that features Belgian Trappist beers. "We pair them with foods."
If Dom Armand is at pains to keep the brewery at arm's length from the monks' spiritual life, Philippe Henroz, the brewery's 37-year-old marketing director, does not shrink from bathing the product in a monastic glow.
"I take visitors across the garden and I ask them, `What do you hear? The birds? The wind? The rumble of the brewery machinery?' " he said. "It has something to do with the environment. Our objective is to show how we are different."
After quenching Belgium's thirst, the monks are now looking abroad. While Trappist beers account for little more than 1 percent of all Belgian beers, the brewery at Chimay is now shipping to France, Italy, Britain and Scandinavia, but above all to the United States, which is its second largest export market after neighboring France.
For Mr. Henroz and the brewery's other employees, the conundrum is to balance the global thirst for their beer and Dom Armand's abhorrence of empire building.
"It's not necessarily to put a limit on production," Mr. Henroz said, sipping a blond Chimay red label. "We don't want to risk the quality of the product, and the working environment."
He paused, then added, "But we will never say no to a client"
Awesome, that one of the best breweries in the world is finally getting some well deserved recognition.
