But despite having these convictions from an early age, and although she was raised in a Catholic home, her father did not think the convent was the right calling for her. “He told me I could better make a living working with my hands,” she recalls. “I wanted to study agriculture, but that was not possible in the abbey school, so the headmistress asked if I might be interested in the brewery.”

Mallersdorf has been a site for brewing beer since the 12th century. It was originally a monastery housing Benedictine monks, who began producing beer as a safe alternative to drinking unclean water for themselves and for the pilgrims who visited them. The monastery was converted to the current Franciscan convent in 1869, and brewing resumed in 1881.

The abbey now houses a modern brewery with two large copper boilers, cooling pans, and a storage cellar. Sister Doris began her apprenticeship in 1966, under the careful watch of another sister who had been brewing beer there since 1931. By 1969, Sister Doris had completed a course in brewing beer at a nearby vocational school. “I had become a master brewer,” she says. “Then I decided that I wanted to join the convent, and I took my vows.”

Brewing is her service to the convent—her assigned profession. “There are 490 sisters in the abbey,” she says, “and some work as teachers in schools, in children’s homes, nursing homes. We also have cooks and pig farmers and a baker. We do everything for ourselves.” Of her own job, Sister Doris says: “I love the work, and I love the smell when I’m making beer. And I love working with living things—with yeast, barley, and with the people who enjoy the beer.”

Monastic brewing has existed since the Middle Ages—monasteries undertook the first large-scale production of beer in medieval Europe—but according to Richard Unger, author of Beer in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, there has not been a specific study of the history of nuns and brewing.

In the secular world, however—particularly when it came to beer for private consumption or small-scale selling—women were the original brewmasters. “It may well be that since the task was classed with domestic chores it was generally done by women,” Unger writes in his book. “But in the high and late Middle Ages, when [brewing] moved from a household industry to a system of [centralized] workshops, you see fewer women brewing.”

The number of women making beer may have declined, but in the late Middle Ages women were predominantly the ones selling it in pubs and taverns. Still, “women who sold beer were long the subject of complaint and even a source for derision,” according to Unger. “The operators of taverns were always suspect in northern Europe because of the problems of drunkenness and disorder which the establishments generated, so the women who ran them had bad reputations.”