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“The monastery life isn’t for everybody,” Peltier says. “It is a tough go. You’re sitting in a dim cellar, making cheese all day, but I had been using Brother Alberic’s cheese and talking it over with my wife, Rachel (Isaak), about how we should go and meet him.”

Photo by Handout

The monks don’t have a listed phone number. But they do operate a small storefront selling monastery wares, including pictures, cards, crosses, jams, honey and, of course, three-kilogram rounds of Brother’s Alberic’s celebrated cheese. The store is open weekdays from 2 p.m. to 5 p.m. Unaware of this, Peltier and Isaak arrived at 10 a.m. one day, poked around the monastery grounds, went to the nearby town to grab a bite and returned at 2p.m. to present themselves to the cheese master, pitching him on the idea that they were, in fact, the chefs/heirs he was looking for.

“I thought that, if I ever get sick and die, I am going to carry the cheese recipe with me to the grave,” Brother Alberic said on a recent afternoon. “So it was better to get someone from the outside and teach them. And Dustin, he is married, and so it was too late for him to be a monk, but …”

But Trappists are an entrepreneurial bunch. They believe in self-sufficiency. They work their land, making honey, jams — and cheese. And while Brother Alberic never sold his wheels to customers, who came from all corners of Manitoba to buy it, for more than $70 — when an equivalent wheel from Europe would retail for about three times as much — a good business is a good business. Alas, none of Alberic’s five brother monks at Notre Dame, the youngest of whom is in his 70s, wanted to be the next cheese maker. Nor did any of the aging Trappists in Quebec, giving the Manitoba monk a free hand (with a Vatican blessing) to teach Peltier.