Trappist beers facing a bleak future

If you like beer, it’s been a bit of a mixed week of news. On Wednesday we learned that lovers of high-end Trappist beers could be facing a bleak future, as breweries now face a supply problem: they’re running out of monks.

The Wall St Journal reports that fewer men taking vows has left several breweries in a delicate position, with some being forced to relinquish their ‘Authentic Trappist Product’ labelling without enough real monks involved to supervise its production.

Yet, as it happens, traditional Trappist breweries aren’t alone when it comes to production line problems. On Thursday, one of America’s largest modern day brewers, Molson Coors, revealed it was forced to halt beer production following what was cited as a significant ‘cybersecurity incident’.

According to an SEC filing, hackers had initiated a breach which led to a systems outage interrupting ‘brewery operations, production and shipments’ for the brewer of Coors, Miller and Blue Moon beers.

But strangest of all was the news from Argentina on the disappearance of some 700 litres of craft beer that had been left to age chained to the wreckage of a sunken ship off the coast of Buenos Aries.

In what many viewed as a bizarre experiment, the owners of three local artisanal breweries behind the project sank the beer in a bid to create a dark strong ale of between 11 and 12 percent which would then be mixed with another beer on resurfacing to create some 2,000 bottles.

However, in further proof that crime doesn’t pay, it’s believed that the ‘sticky-fingered’ scuba divers who made off with the ale are in for bitter disappointment.

“If they stole it for their own consumption, they’re going to have to throw it away,” explained Juan Pablo Vincent of Baum Brewery In Dive magazine. "It was a lukewarm, gasless liquor that would be very difficult to drink."