Apparently monks were creative when fasting at lent to bend the rules by making high calorie beer and throwing pigs into a well because they can only eat meat if it came from water. How accurate is this and what other creative ways did they try and bend the rules at lent or when fasting?

I’m not entirely sure about throwing pigs into wells, but I do know that many monastic communities did make their own beer for a number of reasons, helping with fasting being one of them. The most famous of the monastic orders that made their own beer is the Trappist order. Offering hospitality to guests, travelers, pilgrims, and the poor was required, and therefore the monks brewed their own beer to show such hospitality. Trappist monks in Belgium originally operated three separate breweries within monasteries, brewing beer for guests, for the monks, and for travelers, pilgrims, and the poor, respectively. However, they found out that they could combine all three breweries into one and developed a process to brew different types of beer. They did this by using the same grain mash to create successively weaker beers, with the first run through the mash being the stronger, more flavorful beer, while the third or fourth would be relatively weak. This was how Belgian Trappist monks created the Trappist beer categorizations we have today, with quads, trippels, dubbels, and regular, generic Trappist abbey ales. Due to the strong flavors of quads and trippels, these Trappist monks would use the beer to help them get through fasting during Lent.

Meanwhile, in Germany, something very similar was happening in Munich with the creation of the doppelbock. The bock was originally a dark, malty ale from Central Germany which later made its way south to Bavaria, where it became lighter in color, slightly sweeter, but much stronger. Nowadays, there are a wide range of variations on the bock, with the doppelbock being one of the more popular ones. This was a much stronger variant originally made by the Paulaner Friars in Munich to create what was basically “liquid bread” to get the monks through Lent. In fact, the original Paulaner brewery in Munich is still in operation today, with their original doppelbock, known as Salvator, still available on shelves both in Germany and abroad today. There must have been other ways to get around the rules of fasting, but making beer is the one way that I know about in depth. There were likely many other ways to bend the rules that I don’t know about, but I’m sure others do