How to Actually Buy Westvleteren
What the abbey's rules actually say, and what the internet keeps getting wrong
Donkerstraat is a farm road. It runs past the abbey wall at Westvleteren, and at the end of it there is a hatch where somebody puts crates of beer into the back of your car. Getting to that hatch is the hard part.
Most of the advice online describes a system that no longer exists. The beer phone is gone. The webshop does not open at random unannounced moments, whatever you have read; there is a published calendar, and you can look at it right now. And it is no longer true that the abbey will not deliver. If you live in Belgium, it will.
Here is how it actually works.
There are exactly two legitimate ways to buy it
Crates, from the abbey, ordered online. Wooden crates of 24 bottles, bought through the abbey's webshop by registered private individuals, then either collected at the abbey by car or, if you live in Belgium, delivered.
Six-packs, in person, at In de Vrede. The cafe across the road from the abbey sells take-away six-packs to people who are physically standing there. In their own words: "The beer can only be collected by visitors to Cafe In De Vrede," and "We cannot reserve or send beer."
That is the entire list. Everything else you find online is somebody reselling, which the abbey's terms explicitly forbid and which is the reason the system is as tightly controlled as it is.
Route one: crates through the webshop
Register first, and register properly. You create an account with your name, address, date of birth, email and the licence plate of the car you will collect in. The account is not live until you click the confirmation link the abbey emails you. Do this well before you intend to buy, not during a sales window. Registration stays valid after you purchase, so it is a one-off.
Read the calendar. The abbey publishes a sales calendar at trappistwestvleteren.be/bierverkoop. Each day on it can carry three separate pieces of information, and confusing them is the single commonest mistake:
- Kopen is the window in which you can place an order online. These are wide, often running from around 00:30 to 23:00 on a given day.
- Afhalen is when you can collect at the abbey, typically in two blocks, roughly 09:00 to 11:30 and 13:00 to 16:00, with variations.
- Thuislevering is home delivery, marked on selected Saturdays, Belgian addresses only.
The calendar also shows, by crown cap, which of the three beers are available on a given date. Availability is not guaranteed and the quantity of each sort depends on what there is.
Ordering. During a purchase window you log in and click through to order. You are put in a waiting room until your turn comes, and once you are through you are given a limited time to finish. The abbey does not publish exactly how long, so treat it as short: decide what you want before you start, not while the clock is running.
Pay. Visa, Mastercard and Bancontact.
Then collect. You get an email with a QR code. That code, plus a licence plate matching the one on your profile, is what gets the crates into your car. Identity is checked. You cannot collect somebody else's order, and this is checked deliberately rather than incidentally. Collection is at the abbey's sales centre, Donkerstraat 12, Westvleteren.
The four rules that catch people out
- Sixty days. The terms are explicit: you cannot place an order "if you have placed an order in the last 60 days." Not thirty. Plan accordingly.
- Four and eight. The maximum is four crates per type, with a ceiling of eight crates per car.
- One order per vehicle per day. Registering the family's second car to double up is precisely the behaviour the rule exists to stop.
- No reselling, contractually. The terms read: "You undertake not to sell the Products on. In case of breach of this obligation, we are entitled to refuse you in the future to order further Products." They go further and note that if you do sell it on, you may be qualified as a trader, with the tax and administrative obligations that follow.
What it costs
| Per crate of 24 | In dollars | |
|---|---|---|
| Trappist Westvleteren Blond (green cap, 5.8%) | 48 euros | about $56 |
| Trappist Westvleteren 8 (blue cap, 8%) | 51 euros | about $59 |
| Trappist Westvleteren 12 (yellow cap, 10.2%) | 58 euros | about $67 |
Add a 20-euro deposit for the crate and its 24 bottles, or about 23 dollars. You get it back when you return them undamaged, in the original bottles marked Trappistenbier, during collection hours. The abbey breaks the deposit down further: 17.60 euros for the crate alone and 10 cents a bottle. Cardboard packaging is one-way and carries no deposit.
At roughly 2.42 euros a bottle for the 12, about 2.80 dollars, this is, per unit of pleasure, one of the cheapest famous things in the world.
Home delivery, if you are Belgian
Delivery exists, it is real, and it is limited. Belgian addresses only. Beer is sold for delivery in boxes of 12 rather than crates of 24, subject to availability, and dispatch runs within five working days of the order. Somebody has to be there to take it, or you nominate someone. Give the wrong address and there is a 20-euro charge for the trouble. Delivery dates appear on the same calendar, on selected Saturdays.
You also have the ordinary consumer right of withdrawal: fourteen calendar days from collection or delivery, using the abbey's form, with return shipping at your cost. You must be 18.
Route two: In de Vrede, and why it is the better plan
If you are coming from outside Belgium, or you want the beer this week rather than in two months, go to the cafe. In de Vrede sits at Donkerstraat 13, directly across from the abbey, and its shop runs from 10am to 6pm. Take-away six-packs, at fixed prices:
| Per six-pack | In dollars | |
|---|---|---|
| Blond (green cap) | 27.00 euros | about $31 |
| 8 (blue cap) | 27.50 euros | about $32 |
| 12 (yellow cap) | 32.00 euros | about $37 |
No account, no waiting room, no licence plate, no sixty-day cooling-off period. The only requirement is the oldest one the abbey has: presence. They will not reserve it and they will not ship it. Check their calendar before driving, because they have closing days and holiday periods.
Sit down while you are there. Drinking a fresh 12 at cellar temperature, a hundred metres from where it was made, some 330 feet, is a materially better experience than carrying a crate home and opening it in a kitchen in another country, and it costs about five euros, or roughly six dollars.
If you cannot get to Belgium at all
Then, honestly, buy something else. St. Bernardus Abt 12 is made a few kilometres away in Watou, shares a great deal of history with the beer you are chasing, and is available almost everywhere. Rochefort 10 is superb and sits on ordinary shelves.
St. Bernardus Abt 12Dark FruitCaramelMaltChocolateWhat you should not do is order from the shops that will happily sell you Westvleteren online at three, five or ten times the abbey price. Every bottle in that channel got there through somebody breaking the promise they made when they bought it. The monks cap their own prices deliberately, at a level that covers the monastery and no more, and the entire apparatus of accounts, plates and QR codes exists because that pricing decision creates an arbitrage that other people keep trying to harvest. Paying 300 dollars for a six-pack does not get you closer to the abbey. It funds the exact behaviour the abbey has spent years building software to stop.
Once you have it
Store the bottles upright, somewhere dark, between 12 and 16 degrees, which is 54 to 61 Fahrenheit. Do not refrigerate them. In de Vrede's own advice is that the 8 and the 12 need about a year before they begin to show what they are, and a year and a half to two years to arrive fully, so if you have just carried a crate out of West Flanders, the beer in it is younger than the beer you are imagining.
Serve the 8 and the 12 at 10 to 12 degrees, 50 to 54 Fahrenheit. The Blond can be served cold. All three are unfiltered, unpasteurised and refermented in the bottle, which is a technical way of saying the beer is alive and will keep changing whether or not you are paying attention.
And if you take only one thing from this page, take the cafe. Drive to Westvleteren, sit down across the road from the abbey, and drink a fresh 12 at cellar temperature for about five euros. No account, no calendar, no plate. That has always been the real way in.
