STORIES
2
2 April 2016: the fox is in the
chicken coop. Paraphrasing the
words of Jean Van Roy, owner
of Cantillon, one of the world’s
best known independent Belgian
brewers, to describe a date that marked a
before and after in the world of Italian beer:
AbInbev multinational that produces more
than 30% of the world’s beer and boasting
over 500 brands (Beck’s, Budweiser, Co-
rona, Hoegarden, Leffe, Löwenbräu just to
name the most popular) in more than 100
countries, acquired one of the most impor-
tant Italian craft breweries, Birra del Borgo,
brainchild of Leonardo Di Vincenzo.
To better understand what we’re talking
about, however, it’s important to take a step
back to the ‘90s brave forerunners began
producing Italy’s first craft beers, becoming
the national flag bearers of that craft revo-
lution that had begun in the States United
in the late 1970s.
THE PIONEERS OF CRAFT BEER IN
ITALY
Beyond some unfortunate experiments that
were really too ahead of their time, conven-
tionally the beginning of the artisan beer
movement is noted as 1996, when brewer-
ies were first emerging and which brought a
boost of novelty, thanks to brands that are
still to this day riding the wave of success:
Baladin in Piozzo (Cuneo), Beba in Villar
Perosa (Turin), Birrificio Italiano in Lurago
Marinone (Como), Lambrate Brewery in Mi-
lan, which were all slightly preceded by the
Turbacci Brewery in Mentana (Rome).
From that moment on, craft beer has vir-
tually exploded: the number of breweries
grew dramatically and today there are more
than a thousand producers, also consider-
ing beer firms (producers who rely on other
breweries’ facilities). «The craft beer sector
has recently experienced a boom,» explains
Michele Cason, President of Assobirra,
an association that protects Italian beer
and malt producers (artisan and industrial)
- After the birth throughout the entire coun-
try of new entreprises that for the most part
were young, today there are 862 microbrewer-
ies, with a production of 504,000 hectoliters.
The organizations surveyed from Northern to
Southern Italy employ 3,000 employees and
are divided into craft breweries (692) and brew
pubs (170)». Of course, from a consumption
point of view craft beer is still in a niche:
3.1%. Everything else, that huge 97%, is the
prerogative of the beer industry.
CRAFT BEER VS. INDUSTRIAL.
DIFFERENCES AND LAWS
But what do industrial beer and craft beer
actually mean? To distinguish the two
things, a law issued on July 6th, 2016 comes
to our aid: “Craft beer is defined as beer pro-
duced by small independent breweries and
not subjected to pasteurization and micro-
filtration processes during the production
phase [... ] A small independent brewery is
a brewery that is legally and economically
independent of any other brewery [...] and
