Maredsous 8: The Abbey Dubbel That Two Printers and a German Monk Built

Not Trappist, and That's the Point

Say the word "abbey beer" to most people and their mind jumps straight to the Trappists: the six or so Belgian monasteries where monks in silent robes still brew behind the walls, and where the beer is made, by rule, inside the enclosure and for the benefit of the community. Maredsous looks and sounds like it belongs to that world. It has the goblet, the dark ale, the "8" and "10" numbers, the abbey imagery, the reverent feel. But Maredsous is not a Trappist beer, and it never has been. It is an Abbey beer, a distinct and often misunderstood category, and the difference is worth getting right, because it's the whole reason a beer named after a Benedictine monastery in the hills of Wallonia is actually brewed by the Duvel Moortgat family up in Flanders.

A Trappist beer must meet strict conditions: it's brewed within the walls of a Trappist monastery, under the monks' control, with profits going to the community or to charity. That's what the hexagonal "Authentic Trappist Product" logo guarantees. An Abbey beer is something looser and older in spirit: a beer connected to a monastery by name, recipe, or license, but usually brewed by a commercial brewery that pays the abbey a royalty for the use of its name and blessing. The abbey lends its history, its identity, and often its quality standards; the brewer supplies the tanks, the trucks, and the reach. It is, at its best, a genuine and mutually beneficial partnership. At its worst (with the flood of invented "abbey" brands that have no monastery behind them at all) it's pure marketing.

Maredsous sits firmly at the honest end of that spectrum. There is a real Benedictine abbey. There are real monks. The beer really does support the community. And the brewer is one of the most respected family breweries in Belgium. To understand why the arrangement works, you have to go back to a hillside in the Molignée valley in the 1870s, and to two brothers who printed prayer books.

A Valley, a Monk, and Two Printers

Maredsous Abbey was founded on 15 November 1872: young, by monastic standards, and with an unusual pedigree. It was established not by a local order but by Beuron Abbey, a German Benedictine house that was in the business of founding new monasteries across Europe. The man driving the Belgian foundation was Hildebrand de Hemptinne, a Belgian monk who had entered Beuron and would go on to become Maredsous's first abbot and, later, the first Abbot Primate of the entire Benedictine Confederation. A Belgian trained in Germany, sent home to build something new: Maredsous was international from its first stone.

The money and the land came from the Desclée family, specifically the brothers Jules and Henri Desclée, wealthy Catholic printers who specialized in liturgical publications and who were deeply invested in the nineteenth-century revival of Christian art. Both brothers had served in the Papal Zouaves, the volunteer force that defended the Papal States, and both wanted to see monastic life and sacred craftsmanship flourish again in Belgium. They chose a picturesque site on the Desclée family estate in the Province of Namur, donated the land, and paid for the design and construction of the monastery that would rise there.

They did not build modestly. The Desclées commissioned Jean-Baptiste Bethune, the leading figure of the Belgian Gothic Revival, to design the abbey. What Bethune produced is one of the great neo-Gothic ensembles in the country: soaring pointed arches, a tall spired church, cloisters and school buildings all executed in a rigorous medieval idiom that looks, to modern eyes, far older than it actually is. In 1878 Pope Leo XIII raised the priory to the rank of abbey; in 1926 Pope Pius XI granted the abbey church the title of minor basilica. In barely fifty years, a hillside estate had become one of the most striking monasteries in Belgium and a serious center of Benedictine scholarship, art, and craft.

Monks Who Made Things

Benedictines have always followed the motto ora et labora, pray and work, and the monks of Maredsous took the "work" seriously. The abbey became known not just for its liturgy and its scholarship (it produced a celebrated French translation of the Bible, the "Maredsous Bible") but for a whole range of hand-made products: bread, and above all cheese. Maredsous cheese (a semi-soft, washed-rind cow's-milk cheese made at the abbey's own dairy) is still produced and still carries the abbey's name across Belgian supermarket shelves. The abbey also opened a school, ran a guesthouse, and welcomed visitors to walk the grounds and the valley.

Beer, as it usually did in Belgian monasteries, came into the picture as a way to feed the community and fund its works. The monks of Maredsous began brewing in the earlier twentieth century, around the 1920s, making beer, as generations of monks before them had, to support themselves and their charitable mission. But brewing at commercial scale, and later distributing beer to a growing modern market, is a demanding, capital-hungry industrial business. It requires equipment, expertise, hygiene, logistics, and marketing that sit awkwardly beside a life of prayer, study, and cheese-making.

By the middle of the century, the monks faced the same fork in the road that every abbey brewery eventually reaches: scale up into a full industrial brewery and its distractions, or hand the brewing to someone who does it for a living and keep the name, the standards, and the royalty. Maredsous chose the second path. And the partner they found would turn out to be one of the best in the country.

Enter the Family That Made Duvel

In 1963, the abbey licensed its beers to Brouwerij Moortgat, the family brewery in Breendonk-Puurs, in Flanders, better known today as Duvel Moortgat. The Moortgat family had been brewing since 1871, and by the 1960s they already had a growing reputation, most famously for Duvel, the deceptively pale, dangerously strong golden ale that would become one of the most admired beers in the world. Under the license, Moortgat would brew and sell the Maredsous line, using the abbey's name and its blessing, while the monks stayed focused on prayer, scholarship, cheese, and their community. Duvel Moortgat has held that authorization ever since.

This is the geography that confuses people: the abbey is in Wallonia, French-speaking, in the wooded Molignée valley in Namur province; the brewery is a hundred kilometers north in Dutch-speaking Flanders. The beer that carries a Walloon Benedictine name is made by a Flemish family brewery, and rather than being a contradiction, it's a small, cheerful emblem of how Belgian beer actually works, criss-crossing the country's linguistic and regional lines in the service of a good glass. The royalties from the beer flow back to support the abbey and its works; the monks retain the connection to their name and heritage; and the beer gets made by people with world-class brewing chops.

The Maredsous range settled into three core beers, echoing the old numbering conventions of Belgian brewing: Maredsous 6 (Blond), a lighter, hoppier golden ale; Maredsous 8 (Brune), the dark abbey dubbel that is our subject today; and Maredsous 10 (Triple), a strong pale golden ale. The numbers, as with so many Belgian beers, are old shorthand from historic gravity scales, not literal alcohol figures, though in Maredsous's case they happen to line up neatly, with the "8" landing at right around 8% ABV.

The Brune: What Goes Into an Abbey Dubbel

Maredsous 8 is a textbook example of the Belgian dubbel, the dark, malt-driven abbey style that Westmalle codified in the 1920s and that has been the backbone of monastic brewing ever since. The dubbel's character comes not from a single dramatic ingredient but from the interplay of a few classic ones handled with care. Start with the grain: a base of Belgian pale malt for fermentable sugar and backbone, built up with darker specialty malts (caramel and Munich-style malts and a touch of roasted grain) that give the beer its deep brown-to-mahogany color and its flavors of toast, caramel, and cocoa.

The second signature of the style is dark candi sugar, a Belgian brewing staple made by cooking sugar until it caramelizes into a syrup or hard candy. Added to the boil, it does two clever things at once: it boosts the alcohol without adding heaviness (because it ferments almost completely, leaving the body lighter than the strength would suggest), and it lends its own layer of dark-fruit, rum, and toffee flavor. It's the secret to how a dubbel can be 8% and still feel graceful rather than thick.

Then comes the yeast, which is where Belgian beer earns its identity. A characterful abbey/Belgian ale strain, fermented warm, throws off the esters and phenols that read on the palate as dark fruit, banana, clove, and a gentle peppery spice: flavor the yeast makes, not flavor added from outside. Hops play a deliberately quiet, supporting role: enough bitterness to keep the malt sweetness in check, but never enough to announce themselves. Finally, the beer is refermented in the bottle, a second fermentation from added yeast and sugar that produces fine, natural carbonation, adds complexity, and lets the beer keep maturing after it's sealed.

The result is a beer that tastes far more complex than its short ingredient list suggests: dark, warming, faintly sweet, cleanly bitter on the close, and unmistakably Belgian.

What's Actually in the Glass

Pour Maredsous 8 into a goblet and it comes out a deep, clear reddish-brown to mahogany, crowned by a generous, lasting tan head that leaves lacing down the glass. The nose leads with dark caramel and toasted brown bread, followed by dried plum, raisin, and fig, a light dusting of cocoa, and that soft banana-and-clove lift from the yeast, all wrapped in a faint whisper of dark rum from the candi sugar.

On the palate it is rounded and malt-forward without being heavy. Caramelized dark malt and dark fruit lead (plum, dark cherry, a little fig) with a ribbon of chocolate and coffee running through the middle and just enough dark-fruit sweetness to feel generous rather than syrupy. What keeps it honest is the finish: bittersweet and cleanly drying, dark chocolate and a gentle roast fading over a warm, faintly spiced close. At 8% it drinks with real ease: the body is medium and smooth, the bottle-conditioned carbonation is fine and lively, and the alcohol shows up as a soft glow rather than heat.

It is, in short, an extremely well-made everyday dubbel: not a rare unicorn to be chased across Belgium, but a reliable, characterful, food-friendly abbey brune that over-delivers for what it is. That's exactly the kind of beer that belongs on a bar list: dependable, distinctly Belgian, and generous with its flavor.

The Proper Glass

Like most abbey ales, Maredsous is built to be served in a stemmed goblet or chalice, the wide, footed bowl that has become shorthand for Belgian dark ales. It isn't just tradition for tradition's sake. The wide mouth lets the beer breathe and pushes its dark-fruit-and-caramel aroma up toward your nose; the bowl gives that big, rocky head room to form and hold; and the stem keeps your hand off the bowl so the beer stays at its ideal cellar-cool temperature, around 8–12°C (46–54°F), not fridge-cold. Serve a dubbel too cold and you mute exactly the malt-and-fruit complexity you're paying for.

Pour it with intention: tilt the goblet, pour steadily down the side, then straighten up at the end to raise a proper two-finger head. Because it's bottle-conditioned, there's a fine layer of yeast at the bottom of the bottle: leave the last splash behind if you want a clear glass, or roll it in for a fuller, hazier, more rustic pour. Either is correct. That's your call.

What to Eat With It

A dubbel is one of the most food-friendly beers on any list, because its caramel-and-dark-fruit backbone mirrors the browning and caramelization in so much cooking. The classic move is to drink it alongside the very dish it's often cooked into: carbonnade flamande, the Flemish beef stew braised in dark ale, which finds an almost self-referential harmony with the beer's malt sweetness. Roasted meats (pork, duck, venison) do the same, the beer's warmth and gentle bitterness cutting through the fat. And nothing loves a dubbel like an abbey cheese: pour Maredsous 8 beside a wedge of the abbey's own washed-rind cheese, and you've reunited two products of the same monastery on the same plate.

Dessert is the other sweet spot. The beer's chocolate-and-coffee finish makes it a natural with dark-chocolate brownies, a caramel tart, or crème brûlée, the roast and bitterness keeping the sweetness in check on both sides of the glass. It's the kind of beer you can carry from the main course straight through to dessert without ever changing your order.

How We Pour It at Mort Subite

Maredsous 8 is exactly the sort of beer we love having on the list at Mort Subite: a genuine, well-made abbey dubbel with a real monastery and a great brewing family behind it, at a price and an availability that mean you can actually order it on a Tuesday instead of chasing it across Belgium. It's the workhorse counterpart to the rare Trappist legends: same family of flavors, same reverent tradition, but built to be enjoyed regularly rather than hoarded.

We serve it the way it wants to be served: in a stemmed goblet, poured to a proper tan head, kept at cellar-cool so all that caramel, dark fruit, and cocoa can actually show up. If you're new to Belgian dark ales, this is one of the friendliest doors into the whole world: approachable, generous, and forgiving, with enough depth to reward slow attention. And if you've been down the abbey road before, it's a comfortable, characterful old friend that never disappoints.

It also tells the story we love telling here: that Belgian beer is a web of partnerships and history criss-crossing a small country: a Benedictine abbey in a Walloon valley, built by German monks and Belgian printers, its beer brewed by the Flemish family that made Duvel, poured into a goblet on Congress Avenue in Austin, Texas. That's a lot of history to fit into eight percent. It goes down beautifully anyway.

Come find a Maredsous 8 at Mort Subite. We'll pour it in the proper goblet, at the proper temperature, and let a Walloon abbey and a Flemish brewery do the rest.