With Its 30th Anniversary, Italian Craft Beer Comes of Age
From ancient Rome’s legendary Falernian to modern Super Tuscans, Italian wine has been famous for thousands of years. But when it comes to beer, Italy has only crept into the world’s consciousness over the last couple of decades. It might not be quite as celebrated as countries with longer brewing traditions, but Europe’s big boot is starting to be seen as a land with a compelling craft culture of its own, including a remarkably diverse beer market, fueled by a fan base of extremely knowledgeable beer lovers.
For Agostino Arioli, brewer and owner of Birrificio Italiano, one of the country’s first small producers, that’s a big change from when he started out 30 years ago. At the beginning, his own customers didn’t believe his claims.
“They thought I was lying when I said that I was brewing my beer right there in the same pub where we were pouring it,” he says. “Now everything has changed, and people know a lot.”
With at least one breakout indigenous beer style, Italian pilsner, that has become popular among brewers and beer fans around the world, and 34 wins at the most recent Brussels Beer Challenge, to say nothing of other big international competitions, Italy’s beer culture certainly seems to have come of age. Though there have been a few recent rough spots, signs point to future development, including pending legislation that could add depth to an already dynamic brewing scene.
The Way Things Were
To celebrate the arrival of Italian craft beer — and the 30th anniversary of Birrificio Italiano and other producers — many of the country’s craft pioneers gathered for a two-day conference at Birrificio Italiano, about 20 miles north of Milan, concluding today. Brewers and owners from Birra Baladin, Birrificio Lambrate, and other breweries that launched in 1996 gave presentations on how things were when they started. A few high-profile guests from abroad flew in to join them, including Matt Brynildson, brewmaster at Firestone Walker.
That’s a big difference from the early days of Italian craft beer, when almost no one outside or even inside the country had ever heard of what became known as birra artigianale. Back then, brewers like Arioli and Teo Musso at Birra Baladin often had to explain what they were brewing to their customers, as well as why people should care. Alessandra Agrestini, a freelance beer consultant and author of “Di cotte e di crude. 30 anni di birra artigianale italiana,” says that sometimes they even struggled to buy ingredients.
“The early days of the craft beer movement were quite complicated,” she says. “For example, it was very difficult for the first microbreweries to find raw materials, because they were too small for the suppliers.”
Those early producers were also completely dependent on imported malt and hops, which came from countries with more established beer industries. But today, Italian craft breweries can boast about beers made with all-Italian ingredients. Those can even include local hop varieties, like those grown just outside of Modena by the Italian Hops Company, which started up in 2014.
The conference was meant to cover some of those early struggles, Arioli says, and look at where things stand today, as well as potential paths forward.
“We want to collect the opinions of all of us, and discuss what we could eventually do to, let’s say, help the craft beer culture, more than the craft beer market,” he says.
In part, he says, that could include focusing on a feature that originally made Italian craft beer stand out on the international stage: a surprisingly wide range of flavors and styles. As elsewhere, some newer brewers in Italy have started focusing just on hazy IPAs, he says, ignoring the diversity that once defined the country’s craft beer scene.
Based in Rome, Andrea Turco started the Cronache di Birra online magazine in 2008 before launching Italy Beer Week — effectively, a nationwide beer festival — in 2011. The diversity of Italy’s first craft beers, he says, arose from the country’s lack of deep brewing traditions.
“Italian brewers are not bound by a rigid heritage, which gives them greater freedom to experiment,” he says. In addition, Italy is home to a wide array of ingredients that can be used in brewing, like the chestnuts and chestnut-blossom honey that created a wave of chestnut ales back in the early days. “At the same time, younger brewers are increasingly interested in mastering classic European styles, as a way of paying respect to the continent’s great brewing traditions,” he says.
Naturally, the conference focused on the country’s most popular export, Italian-style pilsner. Invented by Arioli with Birrificio Italiano’s Tipopils, the floral, dry-hopped take on pilsner has since spread around the world, inspiring Firestone Walker’s Pivo Pils, among many others.
Challenges and Shifting Trends
Despite the celebrations that took place north of Milan this month, not everything is sunny in the Italian beer world. As in other countries, some drinkers in Italy have moved on from artisanal ales and dry-hopped lagers to craft cocktails, natural wine, and spirits, Turco says. As drinking trends have shifted, craft breweries across Italy have started closing.
“Today, Italian craft beer seems to be at a turning point,” he says. “It needs to reinvent itself and find new paths for sustainable growth.”
Some of those new routes might lie in Coltivaitalia, the Italian government’s proposed billion-euro plan for the country’s agriculture sector, which Francesca Morbidelli, a beer judge and longtime blogger, recently wrote about. Some of the amendments to that bill could improve things by establishing beer tourism and beer trails, much like the country’s well-recognized wine trails.
“Wine tourism is a big thing in Italy,” she says. “We want the same with beer tourism.”
If the bill passes as planned in the next few months, breweries would be formally recognized as part of Italy’s artisanal production network, which could in turn make it easier for breweries to apply for government grants and programs. And while Italy’s first craft brewers sometimes had trouble getting ingredients, the new law would list the beer industry among the country’s strategically important national supply chains, she says. Moreover, the bill would try to cut back on a particularly Italian problem: bureaucracy.
In the early days, Turco says, small breweries were often overwhelmed by regulations that were written decades earlier for industrial producers like Peroni.
“Italy has never been a traditional beer country, so 30 years ago officials often struggled to understand the concept of a small, independent brewery,” he says. “This is a challenge in many sectors in Italy, but it was particularly difficult for a new and unfamiliar industry.”
In recent years, the country’s craft brewers association, Unionbirrai, has pushed to improve the regulatory framework, helping to pass a dedicated craft beer law in 2016. Still, a patchwork of national, regional, and municipal regulations often makes it difficult for breweries to sell, distribute, hold special events, or even to understand their legal requirements, whether it’s at the national level or under the regulations of the local comune.
“One of the key challenges is the complexity of regulations when combining brewing, food service, and events,” says Monica Nastrucci, coordinator of the social enterprise Il Viaggio, a brewpub and pizzeria located in the rolling hills south of Piacenza. “Any simplification — especially for businesses that integrate brewing with tourism, hospitality, and cultural activities — would be extremely valuable.”
If the legislation currently under debate passes into law, Italian breweries could be newly allowed to serve beer in locations that were not originally designated to be used for hospitality, to take just one example. Other legal gray areas could be cleared up, including contradictory requirements when it comes to serving food and holding festivals.
Another Three Decades of Success
Greater legal clarity and less paperwork would be a welcome step toward taking Italian craft beer to its next level. Even more helpful would be moving craft beer beyond specialized venues like bottle shops and craft bars, Turco says. While it’s true that craft beer no longer needs to be explained to the general public in Italy, its availability isn’t what it could be.
“There is still strong curiosity around craft beer, but too often, it’s simply not available in everyday places, such as supermarkets, bars, or restaurants,” he says. “It needs to reach a broader audience.”
For Arioli, the next few decades of Italian craft beer need to bring the focus back on variety. “We should not be aiming to grow, grow, grow, but we should look to establish a culture of quality, and a culture of diversity,” he says. “That’s what is proper to craft beer.”
What’s unique about birra artigianale comes from Italy’s unique culinary heritage, he says. Knowing your own taste preferences — and even just knowing how to taste — is the first step toward creating something different. Those basic abilities helped to create the diversity of Italian craft beer, where one pint can be wildly unlike the next.
“What I like in our craft beer culture is exactly this, that we still are brewing different kinds of beers, not just the mainstream ones, and people are still looking for a beer that fits with their own taste,” he says. “We Italians, we know our own taste, because we are raised in a food culture.”
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