West Is Best — How Westvleteren 12 Accidentally Became “The Best Beer In The World”

Local news stations reported chaos in that late summer of 2005. Drivers in the Flemish village parked wherever they could, churning up grass and leaving debris. The police were summoned. Helicopters scrambled. People queued for hours outside the village’s monastery, bringing traffic to a standstill.

Then the world saw what was going on and the press started calling. They asked how a handful of monks had achieved such a thing, and why they would even want to. 

The monastic inhabitants of St Sixtus Abbey, a few kilometres south of Westvleteren, had brewed beer for centuries, using the profits to support their peaceful way of life. Like any conscientious brewery, they wanted their beers to be as good as they could be, but it was far from their focus. They certainly didn’t list Westvleteren 12, their Belgian Dark Strong Ale—or “Quadrupel”—on any beer rating sites. So they were probably more surprised than anyone when, in 2005, an American website crowned Westvleteren 12 the “best beer in the world”.

RateBeer was founded in 2000 as a global platform to review and talk about beer; a digital version of the notebooks many beer lovers had carried around their whole lives. But unlike those private notebooks, RateBeer opinions were public and collatable—there was even an annual league table of users’ reviews. For the first time ever, declarations of the “best beer in the world” had empirical data to back them up.

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