Saint Vincent Beer

Ruins of the brewery site beside the gristmill and Saint Vincent Lake in 1982

Saint Vincent Beer was an alcoholic beverage brewed by the monks at Saint Vincent Archabbey in Unity Township, Pennsylvania between 1856 and 1918. The monastery was founded by German Benedictines given permission by Pope Pius IX in 1852 to brew and sell beer after a disagreement with Michael O'Connor, Bishop of Pittsburgh.

The beer was first produced at the archabbey in 1856. The dark Bavarian-style beer sold well and at its height, the monastery produced 1,119 barrels per year. Its popularity and widespread availability brought the monastery to the attention of the Catholic temperance movement. Francesco Satolli, the Apostolic Delegate to the United States at the time, wrote to Leander Schnerr asking for the brewing to be stopped. Temperance advocate and Catholic Priest, released Monks and Their Decline skewering the archabbey for being in the business of producing alcohol. The New York Voice released a piece of yellow journalism about the monks.

The pressure was successful. Due to the negative press, the archabbey had stopped brewing Saint Vincent Beer for external sale by 1900. For the next 18 years, the monks continued to produce the drink for internal consumption. When was elected Coadjutor Archabbot in 1918, the brewery was closed. The brewery, located next to Saint Vincent Archabbey Gristmill, was used for storage until it burned down in 1926. The walls were removed from the site in 1995 when the gristmill was renovated.

Background[]

In 1848, Boniface Wimmer and a group of novices settled in Unity Township, Pennsylvania and established a Benedictine community.^[1] Wimmer came to the United States from Bavaria, Germany and brought the practice of abbeys brewing beer with him. The following year he gained ownership of a tavern and brewery in Indiana, Pennsylvania. Michael O'Connor, the Bishop of Pittsburgh, objected to the monks owning a tavern and a brewery.^[2] Wimmer agreed to close the tavern but wanted to keep the brewery.^[1] O'Connor refused to make the community that Wimmer founded a priory.^[3] Wimmer appealed to Pope Pius IX on a trip to Rome, but was denied.^[3] Through pressure from Cardinal Giacomo Filippo Fransoni and King Ludwig I of Bavaria, the monks gained permission from Pius IX in 1852 to brew beer "providing that every disorder is avoided".^[1][3] Included was the permission to sell the beverage wholesale.^[4]

Early years and golden age[]

The brewery buildings sat in what is now the parking lot for the gristmill

In 1856, the archabbey established a brewery in a small log building next to the Archabbey's gristmill.^[5][4][6] Saint Vincent Beer was available at a bar on the Pittsburgh Pike in 1857, but was only available for widespread sales until after O'Connor resigned as Bishop in 1860.^[5][1] The drink sold well and could be found as far away from Latrobe as Baltimore and New York City by 1868.^[5] To meet this demand, a new two-story brewery building made out of brick was constructed next to the old one.^[6] This was the start of the golden age of Saint Vincent Beer which lasted until 1888.^[1]

In 1868, the monastery was selling about 900 barrels of the beverage per year; production peaked at 1,119 barrels in 1891.^[1] The archabbey made $3 (equivalent to $60 in 2020) on the $14 wholesale price of each barrel in 1868.^[7] During the golden age, several additional buildings were constructed on the brewery site including a malt house, two ice houses, cellars for storing the finished beverage, and a cooper house where barrels were produced by the monks.^[6]

Beer Fuss[]

In the 1890s, the golden age of Saint Vincent Beer was followed by controversy and condemnation of the archabbey over the brewing of the drink, known as the Beer Fuss.^{[note 1]} This era is marked by negative attention from the growing temperance movement in the United States. Omer Klein, the archivist of Saint Vincent College, points to intra-Catholic ethnic conflicts between Irish-American Catholics and the German-American archabbey as an additional reason for the Beer Fuss.^[1] Jerome Oetgen, a historian of the Archabbey, agrees that the monastery received criticism from Irish-Americans but counters that many of the staunchest critics were fellow German-Americans.^[4]

The first rumblings of the Beer Fuss could be seen in 1892 when , the second archabbot, resigned due to internal divisions in the monastery over the manufacturing of alcohol.^[1] Hintenach had only been the archabbot for four and a half years at that point. The Indianapolis Journal reported in 1895 that the same year the "Abstinence Society", probably the Catholic Total Abstinence Union of America, started pressuring the monastery to stop manufacturing alcohol.^[5]

In 1895 the parish priest Ferdinand Kittell sent a letter to Leander Schnerr asking him to put an end to the archabbey selling the drink to the public.^[4] Kittell wrote:

No complaint is made of the brewery itself, or your right of making or using beer; that is your own affair which we have no right to meddle. But for the fact of your selling it, and it being advertised in secular papers as "on tap" in various saloons, is regretted by the clergy of the diocese without exception, for it brings odium on the Church and shame on our people.^[8]

Schnerr declined, pointing to the permission the monastery received in 1852 from the pope.^[9] Unfazed, Kittell petitioned Francesco Satolli, the Apostolic Delegate to the United States, to stop the archabbey from selling Saint Vincent Beer since the monastery was not under the control of the local diocese.^[9] Satolli did not forward Kittell's letter to Pope Leo XIII, but wrote to Schnerr asking him to stop the large-scale production of alcohol due to the "evil of intemperance" and the work of the Catholic temperance movement.^[1][9] In addition to applying pressure from within the Church, Kittell engaged in a media campaign against the monks by writing anti-Saint Vincent Archabbey articles in the Catholic Citizen and the Western Watchman.^[10] Kittell suggested that Saint Vincent Archabbey, Seminary, and College take after the University of Notre Dame, a successful Catholic institution of higher education that did not need to produce alcohol to balance its finances.^[11]

, a temperance advocate and Catholic priest, released Monks and Their Decline in 1898.^[9] Zurcher's pamphlet skewered the archabbey for brewing Saint Vincent Beer instead of joining the temperance movement.^[12] In it, he mocked the post-nominal letters of Benedictines, OSB, claiming that they should stand for "the Order of Sacred Brewers" and claimed that the monks were the reasons that many lay Catholics continue to get drunk.^[12] This brought the monastery into the popular consciousness outside of Pennsylvania. After being prompted by Martin Ignatius Joseph Griffin, a prominent historian of the Catholic Church, the New York Voice, a pro-temperance newspaper, released a "sensationalized exposé" about the archabbey, college, and brewery.^[13][14] The monks responded to the attention with silence and the media lost interest in the story.^[15]

Decline[]

Due to the negative publicity and pressure from temperance groups, the monastery discontinued on April 29, 1899.^[11][16] The monks, however, continued to brew the beverage for internal use.^[17] In 1918, the brewery closed after Aurelius Stehle was elected Coadjutor Archabbot.^[1] The next year, on January 29, 1919, the Eighteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution was ratified making it illegal to produce alcoholic drinks and starting Prohibition.^[1] Officially, the brewery building was used for storage for the farm, but monks probably made some bootleg beer there as well.^[1][15] On January 13, 1926, most of the brewery buildings burned down in the middle of the night.^[18] The ruins of the brewery complex stood until 1995 when they were demolished during the restoration of the gristmill.^[19]

Beer[]

The drink was a dark, hoppy Bavarian-style beer.^[7] Its grain came from the archabbey's fields that was malted on site and fermented with water and hops.^[7] The young beer was then aged in open vats and then barreled into casks made by the monks for shipment.^[7]

There are several conflicting accounts of what became of the recipe for the beverage. Local legend states that the monks sold the recipe to Latrobe Brewing Company or another brewery.^[20] The Loyalhanna Brewing Company was active in Latrobe, Pennsylvania, the city near the archabbey, from 1900 until 1910. The Latrobe Bulletin speculated in 2003 that the Loyalhanna Brewing Company's Monastery Beer was either the Saint Vincent Beer recipe or just named after Saint Vincent Archabbey.^[21] Monastery sources have routinely claimed that the recipe was lost, oftentimes when the brewmaster died because it was not written down.^[1][22] However, in a 2009 NPR segment, a monk, who was only named as "Father Thomas," made the claim that the recipe was not lost but it is "not accessible" to the public.^[20]

References[]

Notes[]

Citations[]

Bibliography[]