Their foresight was impressive: The beer itself is, today, perfectly au courant. Monks are used to thinking in terms of decades or centuries rather than the next quarter or year perhaps they saw the future because they were used to peering so deeply into time. Eventually, they liked what they had and kept it that way. “I never updated the recipe, which is something the monks explicitly asked me.” Development of the beer started years before it was released, and the monks let it evolve over the next two decades. “… in 1954 it was Brother Thomas Sas who developed the ‘Tripel’ as it is today,” Adriaensens reports. But it’s the next part of his story that reveals the essence of monastic brewing. The Trappist order believes monks should support their own monasteries it’s the reason they got into brewing (and cheese-making) in the first place. Jan Adriaensens, the man who has overseen brewing at Westmalle since 1982, explains the evolution this way: “The formulation of the Tripel was first developed in 1936, when the monks of Westmalle built a new brewery with a higher capacity, for funding projects like new monasteries.”

A group dedicated to upholding tradition across the centuries does not seem likely to lead innovation, but perhaps there’s some wisdom in looking a little closer at this. This seems barely worth mentioning, since it mirrors the trends everywhere else, but consider this: The radicals at the forefront of this evolution in Belgium were Trappist monks.

Now, of course, it is the ambers and browns that are rare-blonds proliferate. Indeed, blond ales were such a rarity that, when the monks at Westmalle released a coruscating, golden beer called Tripel in the 1930s, it counted as a radical move. Golden hues in a barley beer would have seemed pale to them in all the wrong ways-pale flavor, pale strength, pale quality. Drinkers and brewers both believed a long boil was critical in developing flavor, and deeper color was its proof. This was true of most of the barley beers, which in the 19th century were regularly boiled for eight or 10 hours to develop color (wheat beers were different they could be made pale or “white”). And until fairly late in the 20th century, Belgians hankered mainly for dark ales. As late as the 1960s, they were still resisting the charms of industrial lager, and when you pore through the gem case that contains Belgian ale styles, you still find many ancient treasures.

Belgians, in the realm of beer at least, are slow to give up their traditions.

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