Without a clumsy duchess, one of the world's great beers might never have been born. Thanks to an overzealous cleaning crew, it was almost killed.

The duchess in question was Mathilda of Tuscany, an 11th-century Italian noblewoman best known for helping to defend a succession of popes during their battles with the Holy Roman Emperor Henry IV.

Between all the battles, Mathilda somehow found time to visit Belgium. On her travels, she dropped one of her prized golden rings into a lake. She swore if it were found, she'd build a monastery out of gratitude. A trout swam by with the ring in its mouth, and the Abbey of Orval (golden valley) was born.

While there isn't much historical documentation for the Mathilda legend, Orval's beer certainly has a noble character all its own.

Produced by a brewery housed in what is now a Trappist monastery, it's a unique beer even among the full-of-character array of Trappist ales.

Orval has a complex aroma and flavour, with hints of apricot, citrus peel and what some have described as barnyard. It's also got substantially more hop aroma than most Belgian beers, thanks to the use of an English technique called dry hopping, by which hops are added to the beer after brewing.

Finally, and perhaps unusually for Trappist beers, which tend to be fairly heavy and sweet, Orval has a bracing tartness and relatively light body.

That tartness and light body are where the cleaning crew comes in.

Though monks at the Orval site have been brewing beer on and off for centuries, the current recipe was created in the early 1930s.

The brewmaster at the time ' not a Belgian monk, but a German layman named Martin Pappenheimer ' decreed that the tank used to brew the beer shouldn't be washed too thoroughly. During the 1950s, as part of a modernization of the brewery, Pappenheimer's advice was ignored. Cleaning crews wiped out the tank with harsh cleansers, paying particular attention to a calcified deposit left at the bottom. The new, sparkling clean tank produced a beer that was less than, well, sparkling.

The lustrous, white head and wild, tart complex flavour of Orval was gone. That calcified deposit, it turned out, was more than just an inert lump. It was also home to several strains of wild yeast, including one called brettanomyces.

After some hard work in a laboratory, an Orval monk, Brother Dominique, figured out what the problem was: brettanomyces, which most brewers think of as an infection, was actually what gave Orval's beer its special taste.

Brother Dominique had a bold idea ' he decided to find some samples of wild yeast outside the brewery.

"He had the idea to raise it in the lab and deliberately add it to the beer. ... Most brewers are very afraid of wild yeasts because they're very difficult to control," says Fran??ois de Harenne, export manager at Orval.

Since Brother Dominique rescued it, Orval has remained one of the world's most intriguing beers. Occasionally, the brewery has tweaked the recipe, adding or subtracting different kinds of hops or malt, but that wild yeast and its wild character remain.

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