Una birra, per favore!

Occasionally I go abroad, even if this means leaving the German beer behind. I have a fairly strict policy of drinking only the local beer wherever I am (though I admit that I occasionally have a coffee with breakfast instead). This time, my destination was Italy - and this blog entry is, as you may already have guessed, about Italian beer.

It’s hard not to love Italy. Italy has the best food made from the best ingredients, excellent wine, great weather, fantastic scenery, interesting cities and crazy traffic. However, when it comes to beer, there are some serious shortcomings – a couple of major breweries control the vast majority of the market, offering the standard, fairly bland, pilsner-style thirst quenchers. Well, at least this used to be the case until a few years ago.

My Christmas gift to my lovely wife was a trip to Venice. Not, as you may expect, to glide romantically up and down the polluted canals in a sleek boat powered by some stripy-shirted Casanova singing O Sole Mio at the top of his voice whilst charging so much it makes you wonder if he accidentally quoted you in Lire instead of Euros. Instead, the plan was to romantically stroll cross every single one of the 400-odd bridges and occasionally stop for a well-deserved beer.

We soon discovered that the beer scene in Italy is way more interesting than originally thought. Just like Venice itself, it is much more rewarding if you scratch a little below the surface and venture down lanes where few tourists ever go. You may then accidentally find yourself sitting by a canal in glorious sunshine, watching old ladies drinking their afternoon grappa whilst sipping a beer from Venice’s own microbrewery.

The biggest trend seems to be massive 750ml bottles with fancy labels and champagne corks that the waiter will open with considerable fanfare, even letting you test-taste the beer before pouring. The prices of these beauties are clearly set by the gondolier’s guild to make their gondola trips seem cheap, so if you fancy something to get you drunk on a budget then the house wine is a better choice. However, if you’ve grown up with insane beer prices or have more money than sense (most Norwegians have both), you should go ahead and try one. Once you disregard the normal continental sin of serving the beer way too cold in glasses that have been washed together with fatty foods (a blog post is coming up on this topic), you’re likely to enjoy a tasty beer with plenty of hop spiciness on the palate.

Even though the vast majority of the beer drunk in Italy comes from the standard brands – Moretti, Peroni, Beck’s and Heineken seem to be the ubiquitous ones – there’s clearly an increasing appreciation of alternative and more interesting beer styles. Italy is, after all, one of the few countries where family-owned small businesses still haven’t been swallowed by the multinational chains (there isn’t a single Starbucks in the whole country), and there’s a strong culture for eating and drinking local produce, and I like it.


To be fair, even I don't require a large selection of top-quality beers to enjoy Italy. It's a great country for a holiday, with the possible exception of Naples where they apparently haven't collected the rubbish since 2009, though even that sounds oddly interesting. On the other hand, it's also nice to get back to Germany where everything is organised and the buildings don't look like they're about to fall down, even if they sometimes do anyway.