Brewery

Brewing Process

Ingredients
Just like every brewer we use water, malt, and hops as the basis for all our beers. A minute portion of the malt we use is dried over peat. In the best trappist tradition, we also add some candy sugar in all of our beers. But the ingredients that really set our beers apart are the spices that we use. These are herbs that traditionally grow in the land surrounding the abbey. This way our beer literally connects with the place we call home.

Brewing
Our abbey possesses a modern brewery in which two brethren brew our Zundert Trappist ales under supervision of a layman brew master. The brewery is classical in set-up with a mash tun, lautering tank and cooking kettle.

In the brewery we make a mash out of water and crushed malts. We heat this mash to activate the enzymes that transform starch into sugar. We filter the mash in the lautering tank. The husks from the barley malt work as filtering agent. We boil the resulting clear and sweet wort for about one hour and a half. During the boil, we add hops for bittering. In the whirlpool we remove any sediments, but we also add some extra hops and our proprietary mixture of herbs.

Fermentation and maturation
We quickly cool the bitter-sweet wort and pump it to our fermentation tanks. This is where we add our yeast. During fermentation this yeast will transform part of the sugars to alcohol and carbon dioxide (the bubbles in beer). This will take about a week. After this we lower the temperature and the beer will mature for a minimum of three weeks before we transport it for bottling.

Bottling
Maria Toevlucht Abbey and Trappist Brewery De Kievit are located in an area of great ecological importance. In order to disturb the peace as little as possible, we have decided to have our beers bottled at an external location. During bottling some extra sugar and yeast are added so the beer can referment in the bottle. Bottling takes place at Koningshoeven Trappist Brewery, which belongs to our mother abbey Onze Lieve Vrouwe van Koningshoeven.