Before the French Revolution, most abbeys would have brewed their own beer just as they baked their own bread and butchered their own meat. The same would be true in a manor house, estate or castle, to brew is to boil a solution of barley-malt sugars with hops. Having been boiled, even today beer is safer than water. At the time, water was a great deal less safe than it is today. As the number of abbeys making their own beers dwindled, commercial brewers began to produce beers that implied monastric origin. In 1949 the Benedictines of Maredsous decided that pilgrims should be offered a drink - leading to the arrangement with Moortgat. There are at least 70 abbeys, convents and beguinages in Belgium, and these divide in more or less equal numbers between those that are still inhabited, others that have been deconsecrated and put to different uses, and the remainder that survive as ruins. Not all "abbey style" beers are dedicated to extant communities. Many are named after deconsecrated abbeys, or ruins (some of which are local tourist attractions). Others simply celebrate local churches, shrines or saints. The more tenuous the link, the less likely is it that the brewery pays a royalty, but some do - even to the upkeep of a shine or ruin as a tourist attraction. While the Trappist breweries stress that their logo indicates a place of origin, not a style, their beers do have some typical features in common. Apart from the Trappists, none of the abbeys owns or operates its own brewery. This is the distinction between Trappists and Abbeys as an appellation. Single, double and triple - this range of 3 beers dates back to traditional brewing methods in which the mash tun was filled with one charge of malted barley, through which three charges of water were run. The idea was to ensure that every last drop of malt sugar was extracted. Each run would produce a weaker solution, and each would be filled into a separate fermenting vessel - "The Three Tuns". The first running's would produce the strongest beer, the Triple, the second the double, the third the Single. Maredsous is the authentic beer brewed by the Benedictine monks in the abbey with the same name, located near Denee, close to Dinant. 35 monks live, pray and work in Maredsous according to the Rule of Saint Benedict - "ora et labora" (prayer and work). It began as a community of Bavarian monks, on land donated by a Belgian ecclesiastical printer and became an Abbey in 1878. The Maredsous recipe was originally written down by Father Atout. He was also responsible for bread, and developed the Maredsous cheese in the cellar of the abbey.
