Tour Spotlight: Organ Building & Woodworking at St. John's Abbey
An organ blueprint at St. John’s Abbey
A behind-the-scenes tour at our inaugural Story Feast gathering
Every Story Feast gathering includes more than a meal and a cocktail hour. We invite guests to explore the places where they dine, to understand what makes them extraordinary. At St. John's Abbey, that meant offering three optional tours before the cocktail hour. Every single one filled to capacity.
This is what we love about Story Feast guests: you come curious!
A Thousand Years of Benedictine Craft
The tour of Abbey Woodworking and the new organ building workshop wasn't just a behind-the-scenes look at a facility. It was a window into a tradition that reaches back more than a millennium.
Benedictine monks have been building pipe organs since at least the ninth century. As they spread across Europe, they carried with them not only prayer and scripture, but practical arts: bronze-casting, glass-making, wood-carving, and organ building. The monastery was a place of learning and making, where skills were passed from master to apprentice, and craft was considered a form of devotion.
Ora et Labora, pray and work, is the Benedictine motto. At St. John's, the two have never been separate.
The Workshop
Abbey Woodworking has operated at St. John's since the monastery's founding in 1856. The monks harvest lumber from their own 3,000 acres of forest, mill it on site, and build furniture that lasts for generations. Pieces made over 90 years ago are still in daily use.
In 2023, a brand new 30,000-square-foot woodshop opened, and with it, something remarkable: Saint John's Abbey Organ Builders, a world-class organ building workshop led by Austrian-born master builder Martin Pasi.
Pasi is among a small group of builders worldwide who create mechanical-action pipe organs entirely by hand, using methods unchanged for centuries. Every pipe is cast from molten lead. Every key is carved from cow bone. Every component is made in-house, one organ at a time.
He came to St. John's in 2019 to install an expansion of the Abbey church's organ, adding nearly 3,000 new pipes to the original 1961 instrument. During those seven months, he fell in love with the place. When he heard the monks were planning a new woodshop, he proposed something bold: merge his life's work with theirs.
Now, Pasi and his team build organs in Collegeville, training the next generation of builders in a craft that might otherwise disappear.
The woodworking shop at St. John’s Abbey
What Guests Experienced
On the evening of our gathering, guests walked through the new facility with members of the team. They saw raw lumber stacked for drying, tools arranged with monastic precision, and pipes in various stages of completion. They heard stories about the organs Pasi has built, for cathedrals in Omaha, Houston, and Cincinnati, and about the abbey's long history of making things by hand.
They also heard something harder to articulate: the quiet hum of a place where work is done slowly, carefully, and with intention.
Visit St. John’s Abbey Organ Builders →
Looking Ahead: 2026–2027 Season
For our upcoming season, Story Feast tours will be even more expansive. You'll have the option to spend a few days, or just one, or even just an hour, (or none at all if you’re strictly there for the feast!) immersing yourself in a place. Visiting off-site locations that tell the story of a location. Meeting the makers. Understanding the sense of place and identity that makes each location extraordinary.
Because a great meal isn't just about what's on the plate. It's about where you are, who made it, and what that place means.
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