Beer

As any Buckfast fan will tell you, monks are great at brewing booze. And if you think our hipster-driven craft beer boom is impressive, consider that, in Belgium, Trappist monks have been doing it since the middle ages.

In 1958 the monks of Grimbergen came to a deal for the Maes brewery to use their brand. The beer is now fairly mainstream - popular at home and produced by a Carlsberg-owned brewery for foreign markets.

But now the brothers Grimbergen want to get back to basics with a super-craft brew that would have been made in medieval times. The problem? They can’t find the recipe. A team of researchers is combing the abbey’s archive of 35,000 books and files - which date back to 1138 and are mostly written in Old Dutch - to find the measurements.

The monks are confident it’ll show up in time for a new year’s toast. That’s new year 2020.