Apparently the Trappists are irritated that there are a lot of American beers with the word “Trappist” in their names:
The fact that a number of breweries in the USA are using the word Trappist to describe beers that are clearly not produced by Trappist monks has drawn the attention of the International Trappist Association, or I.T.A. The Association considers it a growing problem. For one thing, they don’t like the idea that a consumer might mistake a commercially brewed American beer for an Authentic Trappist brew.
Though I have some sympathy for their frustration, I think the bigger problem is that Americans don’t know what “Trappist” means. Â Forget getting confused about whether a beer is made by Trappist monks or not, before I started researching Belgian beer for my trip I didn’t know that there were monks making beer for public consumption, much less associate that with “Trappist”.
Via BeerPulse.