Reviews

Spend the Night: Having a brew with Ale Abbey

Jason Dean

20 Mar 2025 — 5 min read

There’s a new bishop in town, and he realizes the importance of a frosty brew to your monastery.

Ale Abbey is a tycoon game where you attempt to make a profit for your church by selling beer to the locals. The game starts in the year 1500, a time when monasteries were known for brewing beer throughout Europe. Your abbey starts with one monk and one nun. These two are in charge of doing research, crafting beer recipes, brewing beer and many other tasks around the monastery. Don’t worry, it does not take long before you can recruit others to join your order.

You also start with a bit of money so you can build the necessities. A brewery is obvious, but a library helps your staff learn to create different styles of beer. A kitchen is essential to make meals, while a dormitory provides a bed so workers won’t have to sleep on the floor. If they pass out in the middle of a room from drinking too much, that is their own problem.

Your workers make everything happen around the abbey, so keeping them in top spirits (figuratively and literally) is important. Lighting, decorations and other amenities help turn your beer house into a beer home. By assigning one of your staff to research, you can build new or better amenities to help keep everyone happy. Early in the game, keeping staff satisfied can be difficult, but there is one great way to solve that: share a cask with the staff.

Once you have brewed a few batches, players can create a cellar to store extra beer. Beer can be stored there to age or marked to allow the staff to have a pint. Each nun and monk have their own tolerance. Have a little too much, and they might slow down at their tasks. Have way too much, and they might pass out on the floor and be worthless the next day. Ah, the joys of running a brewery.

Gaining renown allows your abbey to research new styles of beer. Different cities enjoy different brews, and providing them with their desired flavor means more sales. Experiment with new styles or prepare just the right type of beer for an event, and sales go up. Oversaturate a town with your beer, and demand goes down.

Apart from selling beer to the local townsfolk, you will occasionally receive special orders. These are usually larger quantities for special events. With these orders, you can negotiate prices. But be careful, the more you charge to fill the order, the higher the likelihood they decline and take their business elsewhere.

Shipping your beer to nearby towns for sale can catch the attention of others with a thirst for money. Bandits will occasionally steal part of your haul, unless you can work out a deal with them. A little coin tossed their way assures your shipment makes it through in one piece. As you research, you can convince the bandits to accept beer instead of money. Provide them with enough libations, and they’ll actually help your staff load the carts of beer to be delivered.

Ale Abbey is enjoyable, but it is not without its faults. The game can feel slow at times, even when you speed up the days. There are moments when a player has no contracts or special requests from the bishop and is only brewing for the local towns. The game encourages you to hire more employees, but doesn’t provide enough options on how to use them. Initially, our reviewer planned to build a second laboratorium to double the amount of research and give more monks and nuns a purpose within the abbey. However, the game only allows players to have two people doing research at once, at least early on. The game also does not explain why this action is prohibited. Finally, the game feels like it lacks replayability. Again, this is early in the game, and that might change.

Still, after playing almost 12 hours of the game, our reviewer’s verdict is that they plan to stick with Ale Abbey. It’s not groundbreaking, but it is fun and gives you what you want from a business simulator: a unique way to make a buck. It’s the perfect game to play while utilizing a second screen or listening to a podcast. The game is reasonably priced at $15, and is still in early access, which means some of the issues addressed above could be fixed.

Ale Abbey is available now on PC.