Booze, Profit & Prayer

When Europe’s beer-brewing, liquor-distilling monks combine catholicism and capitalism, the results are delicious.

- Stephanie Slade

Behind the gray stone walls of the 900-year-old Grande Chartreuse monastery, high in the French Alps, two monks dry, crush, and sort 130 herbs and spices into burlap bags. The “plants room” where they work is accessible to them alone, because they are the only people on Earth who know exactly which ingredients are in Chartreuse, the bright-green liqueur produced exclusively by their religious community.

Beneath their robes, Father Benoît and Brother Jean-Jacques wear rough sackcloth shirts meant to prevent them from ever getting too comfortable. They are among the 30 or so monks who live in almost total silence on the premises—vowed members of the Carthusians, often referred to as the most ascetic of the Catholic monastic orders. In her book An Infinity of Little Hours, Nancy Klein Maguire calls these men the “Church’s green berets” because of their strict commitment to minimal speech, their vegetarian diet, and their practice of waking up to pray in the middle of the night—a “special responsibility...of being on duty, on call, keeping watch” when the rest of the world is asleep.

According to legend, a French general in 1605 presented the Carthusians with an ancient manuscript containing a recipe for an “elixir of long life.” After more than a century of trial and error, the mother house’s apothecary perfected the medicinal concoction in 1737. It would be produced on site until 1860, when a distillery was constructed nearby.

What started as medical ministry to local villagers is now a global luxury brand. Some 1.5 million bottles were sold in 100 countries last year, primarily for use in high-end cocktails and as an aperitif.