In 1791, in the chaos following the French Revolution, the novice master of La Trappe Abbey - a man named Augustinus de Lestrange Dubosc - fled France for Switzerland and settled with refugee monks at a vacant Carthusian house near Fribourg called Val-Sainte. The Sacred Valley filled past capacity. Lestrange began sending groups out to found new houses: one to Spain, one to Italy, a third to Canada. The Canada group passed through Flanders on its way west. The bishop of Antwerp, Cornelius Franciscus de Nelis, intercepted them and asked if some might stay and establish a Trappist house in his diocese instead. Lestrange agreed to leave eight monks behind. They settled on 6 June 1794 at a small Campine farm called Nooit Rust - never rest. Two novices joined them. The Canada plan never quite recovered, and a community that should not have existed at all began.

Six weeks after they arrived, French troops invaded the Austrian Netherlands and the monks fled to Münster, founding a new house in Darfeld. They returned in 1802. In 1811 Napoleon closed every Trappist house in his empire. They left again. After Napoleon's defeat in 1814 they came back for the third time and were not displaced again. Even then it was close - under William I of the United Netherlands the priory nearly closed for lack of legal status, saved at the last moment in 1822 by the support of Viscount Leonard Pierre Joseph du Bus de Gisignies. The community grew slowly through the 1820s and 30s, until on 22 April 1836 Pope Gregory XVI elevated the priory to a full abbey. Martinus Dom became the first elected abbot. Eight months later, the brewery began.

Westmalle has spent two centuries founding daughter houses. Achel Abbey was established in 1846. Saint-Sixtus at Westvleteren - now famous for the rarest Trappist beer in the world - received material support from Westmalle in its early years. In 1884 the monks founded Ulingsheide Abbey at Tegelen on the German border, specifically to receive German novices fleeing Bismarck's Kulturkampf. In 1894, four brothers and Father Jozef Peeters left for the Belgian Congo and founded a Saint Joseph abbey in Kasai, later relocated to Bamania near Mbandaka. After the First World War the monks helped build a new Cistercian house at Brecht. The brewery funds the abbey. The abbey funds the work. The work supports communities the founders of 1794 would never have imagined.

The monks rise before four in the morning for the first office. They sing seven services through the day, eat in silence in the refectory, and work the rest of the hours in the brewery, the cheese dairy, the farm, the library, the gardens. The cattle the abbey kept for decades were blister-head cows, valued for the milk that became Trappist cheese. The library wing was completed in 1898 and enlarged after the Second World War. The patrimony includes works by Frans Francken the Elder, Albrecht Dürer, Constantin Meunier, Maerten de Vos - paintings and manuscripts collected and preserved by generations of monks who themselves left no signatures. The current abbot, Philip Nathanaël Koninkx, was elected in 2004. He runs an organization that has been continuously in operation, with one major interruption for the Napoleonic Wars, since the year George Washington took his second inauguration.

Westmalle Dubbel was perfected in 1856 - dark, malty, secondary-fermented in the bottle, the ancestor of every Belgian dubbel since. Westmalle Tripel arrived in 1934, pale golden, strong, dry-finishing, and so distinctive that the style now bears its name. The abbey does not aim to become a beer destination. The brewhouse is hidden behind the abbey walls. The café across the road - Café Trappisten - is a separate operation, allowed to serve the beer fresh and on draft to anyone who walks in. The monks do not advertise. They do not maximize production. They brew what the rule of de Rancé asked for: the local beverage of Flanders, made well enough to drink with bread, and sold in quantities sufficient to keep an eight-hundred-year-old order alive into a century that did not exist when ten refugees stopped at a farm called Never Rest.