STORIES«There are two terms that best describe the
state of Italian beer today: maturity and con-
fusion - declared Luca Giaccone and Eu-
genio Signoroni, curators of Slow Food’s
guide to Italian beers - Italian producers
have consolidated their role over the years
and built a strong identity that allowed them
to become popular with an increasingly wider
public, inside and outside of Italy. Beers that
have achieved very high levels of creativity
and reliability have helped us along this path.
At the same time, however, above all due to an
increasingly intrusive position of the brewing
industry which, through acquisitions, crafty
products and marketing campaigns which bor-
rowed the craft movement’s key words, what
the public finds when first approaching beer is
much more complex, multifaceted, tangled and
insidious than it was only five years ago».
Discredited with apostasy, betrayal of the
cause, the ex-artisan breweries were imme-
diately seen as enemies by a whole niche of
consumers and workers involved in crafts-
manship supporters: excluded from the
main trade fairs and festivals (the words
of Jean Van Roy with whom we opened re-
ferred to the desire not to involve Borgo al
Quintessence, one of the most important
European beer festivals), ostracized by
some pubs and clubs, these breweries were
seen as the germ of a dangerous counter-
offensive in the brewing industry which,
especially in the United States, was losing
market share in favour of microbreweries.
The fear of those who defend craft beer does
not arise simply from being entrenched in
an ideology or by exalting the concept of
independence, but rather by fear and the
risk that in the coming years we will return
to the situation that gave rise to the craft
revolution in the first place: a total flatten-
ing of tastes in favour of anonymous beers,
all blonde, all the same, all banal. «There’s
been a great popular movement contrary to all
this, especially among experts who’ve tried to
bring attention to the final customer for whom
an acquired brewery is not very different from
one that is not - explains Manuele Colonna,
publican among the best known in Italy, on
the side of craftsmanship - I believe, and I am
not the only one, that this strategy of acquisi-
tions can be dangerous above all for small com-
panies that are unable to withstand the over-
bearing entry of pseudo-craft products made
by multinationals». Michele Cason is not of
the same opinion, for whom these market
movements can also prove to be something
positive: «Profitably managing a company in
Italy today is extremely complex and difficult
and this is also true in the brewing sector. The
numbers speak for themselves: there are many,
too many companies forced to close because
they are overwhelmed by issues and problems.
In this difficult context, or to revive their busi-
ness, some have sought allies. In some cases,
microbreweries were acquired by larger brew-
eries, thus losing the ability to define their own
“artisan” product, in other cases there were
trade agreements. These acquisitions are not
a problem but an opportunity for development
and AssoBirra has experienced these dynamics