Edible Food Finds: Spencer Brewery
Photos by Michael Piazza
To get to the only Trappist brewery in the U.S. you have to drive slowly, taking a winding country road through a fraction of Saint Joseph’s Abbey in Spencer. The trip affords glimpses of the abbey’s 2,000 acres: on a cool morning in November, there are browning meadows, mossy post-and-rail fences and dense forests of leafless maple and oak trees.
Along the peaceful ride, you see why the 54 brothers of the abbey, a community of Catholic Cistercian monks who first moved to Spencer in 1950, toil to maintain the beauty of their home; indeed, they took a lifelong vow to preserve it. “We have a vow of stability, to stay in this monastery, with these brothers, on this land, for a lifetime,” says Spencer Brewery Director Father Isaac Keeley, seated at a burnished table in the brewery’s foyer.
Spencer Brewery is the economic force propelling that mission of sustainability, Keeley says. The brewery’s big, sleek, modern building with a glass façade rises from beyond the smaller stone building where Trappist Preserves , the monks’ jam and jelly enterprise, is housed . Opened in 2014, the 36,000-square-foot brewery—producing about 4,500 barrels of beer a year—supports the abbey and the monks living within it; as production grows, the monks plan to use some of the revenue to fund large green projects, such as a solar array on the brewery’s roof and an on-site wastewater treatment program. At present, the 50-barrel brewhouse only produces at a tiny percentage of its total capacity, but Keeley’s 10-year plan aims to reach 25% of capacity, which would put production at 10,000 barrels a year.
Meanwhile, the monks have made sustainability a priority for their brewery. They called for an energy-efficient brewhouse, including equipment that recycles the water from each brew. They brought in UMass Amherst researcher Masoud Hashemi, who specializes in plant and soil sciences, to help create a 10-acre field to experiment with planting winter barley for their beer; the field has not yet yielded brewery-quality barley, Keeley says, but the monks remain undeterred. “It reinforces that we are a farmer brewery, and our roots are truly agricultural—that we have this big piece of land to care for, that we have barley or some kind of other grain we can use,” Keeley says, adding they have also used local barley and fruit from Clover Hill Farm in nearby Hardwick, as well as harvested peaches from their own humble orchard.
Outside the brewery, the monks have set aside swaths of the abbey grounds for green initiatives. The largest project to date was a 100-acre solar farm, which can generate up to 20 megawatts of electricity—enough energy to power some 3,302 homes. The abbey does not use the electricity produced by the massive array; instead, the solar farm provides energy to homes across Spencer, including low-income housing. Over the summer, Keeley says, the abbey’s solar farm turned at least a few heads at the annual International Trappist Association (ITA) meeting in Tilburg, the Netherlands, which brought together Cistercian monks and nuns from around the world. This year the assemblage of abbeys discussed sustainability. “When they saw the size of this solar installation, they stopped the meeting,” he says.
The ITA assigns authentic trademarks to 12 Trappist breweries, most of which are committed to greening their operations, including one on the Dutch-Belgian border that uses the roots of plants to purify the wastewater from its brewhouse. To the monks, sustainability is more than a buzzword: It is as old and sacred to their lives as scripture.
“When you are rooted in one place, before sustainability became this cultural thing, there was a level of it that was always part of our tradition,” Keeley says. “That’s what’s behind this.”
This story appeared in the Winter 2020 issue of Edible Worcester.
