Awww, shucks.  Liquid bread sounds good to me.

It would only be a penance for me if it was an IPA.

This only works if the beer is awful, which makes drinking it a penance.

In the 21st Century, we could satisfy your puritanical condition of awfulness by choosing Tecate or Red Stripe (or maybe even Carta Blanca), but they're all modern industrial lagers, thus filtered. So a sensible abbot couldn't justify any of them, being not only far too thin, but also too vitamin-deficient to provide the nutrition that was intended to be provided by the subject doppelbock as brewed by the monks of the Paulaner monastery.

Let's get real: The Paulaner monastery's rule, which the linked article described (possibly superficially) as prohibiting all solid food during Lent, seems likely to create a real risk of starving some of its own monks.  What proportion of those monks could remain healthy enough to perform the physical labor and other tasks that're required for daily life in ordinary times at the monastery?  How about the additional burden of caring for a Lenten peak in the proportion of their fellow monks who become disabled by nutritional-deficiency diseases, e.g., scurvy?   Obtaining even water might be a problem: How much of Lent must be endured in the deep-freeze of Bavarian winter, before their locale's annual thaw?  For years in which Easter falls early in the calendar (March 22 being the earliest possible), would their thaw have arrived by then?

Isn't the abbot of any monastery responsible to at least the sitting pope and God for the health of his monks?  It seems entirely appropriate for an abbot and his senior monks to seek ways to maximize the collective health of their monks, esp. during the annual overlap of both natural and disciplinary privation.  Thus the creative idea to meet the letter of the monastery's rule by providing a carbohydrate-intensive doppelbock, whose unfiltered yeast would be rich in B-vitamins.  For its penitential aspect, it seems likely that for at least some of the monks, naturally acidic beer sloshing around in a stomach empty of solid food would cause hours of internal discomfort ("upset stomach", perhaps centuries before discovery of of effective antacid remedies).  Might that suffice to satisfy not only the puritanical disapproval, but also the apparent envy, expresssed in this topic about the Paulaner monastery's Lenten solution?

Didn't the article linked from the original posting report that the monastery sent a sample of the subject beer overland to the pope, seeking his approval?  Altho' how long its transport required from Bavaria to Rome, and the season in which that was done, is not reported.  But the pope's reaction was indeed that the beer was awful, so he might've considered himself freed from seriously considering what was a genuine issue of monastic discipline and its health consequences during Lent.  I imagine that the beer was ruined by excesive oxygenation as it sloshed around in its barrel during weeks (or months?) in transport, esp. if that was done during warm days that probably would've been the preferred weather for a caravan.

                        This is fasting ?

Love this painting, I'm going to look for a print. Any ideas on the artist?

But did you know that Catholic monks once brewed beer specifically for a liquid-only Lenten fast?
Back in the 1600s, Paulaner monks moved from Southern Italy to the Cloister Neudeck ob der Au in Bavaria. “Being a strict order, they were not allowed to consume solid food during Lent,” the current braumeister and beer sommelier of Paulaner Brewery Martin Zuber explained in a video on the company’s website.
They needed something other than water to sustain them, so the monks turned to a common staple of the time of their region – beer. They concocted an “unusually strong” brew, full of carbohydrates and nutrients, because “liquid bread wouldn’t break the fast,” Zuber noted.

beer fast

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All this talk of beer can have an effect on a man.
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