Playing ‘hard to get’ pays off
Apart
from notoriously good (topping many famous worldwide beer lists),
Westvleteren is also notoriously hard to get. Usually, the only way
to buy the beer is ordering up to three crates by phone (and quite
often, waiting hours to even reach the Westvleteren abbey telephonist) and then
collecting them at the Abbey gates at a time of the monks’
convenience.
For
one time however, the Westvleteren brewery has sold 15,000 boxes –
consisting of six bottles of Westvleteren 12 and two special glasses
– to specialised Massachusetts beer importer Shelton Brothers, who
distributed the boxes throughout the US.
Hundreds of dollars per box
Even
though the prices were rather high, at 85 dollar (65 euro) per box,
the complete stock was sold out in less than a day. Some Americans
were genuinely happy to finally get hold of one of the world’s best
beers, others hurried home to put the offer on eBay, where the boxes
reached prices of hundreds of dollars within hours. The normal price
for one bottle at the abbey gates is… just over two dollar.
The
monks had already seen similar success with their action in Belgium,
where almost all 93,000 boxes were also sold out on the first day of
offering. Many of those boxes also found their way to the US through eBay, for many times the original price of 25 euro.
Exception to fund reconstruction
Westvleteren’s
beers are brewed inside an abbey of the Trappist order, according to
the rules of the Trappist label. Unlike the other beers under that
label (Achel, Chimay, Engelszell, La Trappe, Orval, Rochefort and
Westmalle), the Westvleteren abbey usually observes the strict rules
of the Trappist order to only produce just enough beer to cover the living
expenses of the monks.
The
current exception to the normal ‘hard to get’ rule was deemed
necessary after a landslide caused the abbey to be declared unsafe by
the fire department. The profit from the boxes will be used for the
reconstruction of the abbey: the two special glasses in the box
proudly bear the motto “Ad
aedificandam abbatiam adiuvi” (“I supported the construction of
the abbey”).
