To Drink or To Taste?
I visited the Kulminator in Antwerp on a cold afternoon around 2017 or 2018. The place was discreet, with the modest charm of a tavern that time had forgotten. At the entrance, the owner, an elderly man with a severe face and eyes that missed nothing, stopped us before we could step inside. “To drink or to taste?”, he asked, twice, as if probing our intent. The question aimed at our centre. To drink meant consumption and abandon; to taste implied presence and care. It was a simple question, but it carried the gravity of a rite.
The contrast between drinking and tasting shaped the entire atmosphere of the Kulminator. The space itself seemed to echo the quiet of the Trappist abbeys from which many of its bottles came. Those monasteries, enclosed by walls but open to the heaven above, treat labour as an extension of prayer. Brewing beer there is a daily discipline where patience and precision take on the nature of contemplation. Each cask is a vessel of obedience to time. The monks’ silence becomes the yeast that transforms work into offering, and the beer, when finished, carries within it the stillness of the cloister.
The Trappists follow the Rule of Saint Benedict, who understood that the spirit does not flourish by rejecting matter but by refining it. In his Rule he allowed a modest measure of wine each day – a hemina -, so that moderation itself could become a form of prayer. The word hemina, from the Greek ἡμίνᾱ, meaning “half,” denoted half a sextarius in Roman measure, roughly a quarter of a litre. Its etymology carries a quiet symbolism: the “half” as the precise middle between lack and excess, the point where discernment replaces indulgence.
More at The Mirror of Sienna.
Kύριε ελέησον
