Get Ready For Good Beer Week - The Brewers: Birra del Borgo

April 23, 2013, by Crafty Pint

Get Ready For Good Beer Week - The Brewers: Birra del Borgo

In the run up to the third Good Beer Week, The Crafty Pint is running a series of preview pieces focusing on some of the brewers you may not know much about, some of the more esoteric brews and events and also the events that we’re involved in running and hosting.

First up, meet Leonardo di Vicenzo, founder and head brewer at Italy’s Birra del Borgo. He’s making his second trip to Australia this year, having sold out events in Sydney and Perth back in February. Brewing since 2005, he has risen rapidly to the forefront of the Italian craft beer revolution and has created some truly unique beers – some in collaboration with friends that include Dogfish Head’s Sam Calagione and Baladin’s Teo Musso.

His beers first appeared in Australia at Good Beer Week in 2012 and now he’s back in person for a series of tastings and high end degustations. At the bottom, you’ll find an article The Crafty Pint wrote for Epicure on Leo and Italy’s craft beer scene last year; here is what he has to say for himself.

Name: Leonardo di Vicenzo
Brewery: Birra del Borgo
Where it’s located: Northeast of Rome, Italy
When it was founded: 2005

Which of your beers are you most proud of and why?
This is a very hard question, it’s like asking a mother who’s her favourite son. Every new beer for me is a great achievement, but I’m always very proud of Reale, my first “official” beer and still a bestseller!

Why are you coming to Good Beer Week?
I really enjoyed the atmosphere at the Rootstock Festival and other events I attended last February in Australia and it’s very exciting for me to see how much interest there is in Australia for Italian craft beer, so I’m happy to come back to meet more beer enthusiasts and to share my passion and knowledge with them

What are you most excited about?
I can’t wait for the “My Anchovia” collaboration brew at the Wheaty! [This is part of the Adelaide bar’s Good Beer Wheaty – look out for a story on the site later in the week]

Why should people come to your events?
To discover the Italian craft beer culture and to taste some great beers, of course.

If you were a beer, what would you be and why?
Right now, with all the exciting events going on around the world…. I feel like an old style IPA, maturing inside a wooden barrel to face the long travels to the New World!

You can meet Leo at the following events…

Italian craft beer article from Epicure in The Age, June 2012

There are many aspects of Italian life that are admired the world over: its cuisine, its wine, its fashion, art and classical culture. But its beer? Short of a burst of notoriety last year when Peroni became the latest major overseas brand to be brewed under license in Australia, any focus on the fruits of its brewing industry has been minimal at best.

Sure, in recent years a few offerings from the country’s craft brewers have appeared in select bottle shops, bars and restaurants around Melbourne – the likes of 32 Via dei birrai, Baladin and Birra Roma, for example. But even for drinkers well versed in the growing craft beer scene in Australia, Italian beers have registered only the tiniest of ripples, with attention being grabbed far more readily by the burgeoning local industry and imports from New Zealand, the US and Scandinavia.

So it might be some surprise to learn that the country now has around 450 commercial breweries. To put that into context, despite the rapid growth in recent years, Australia has around a third of that number. It represents a staggering rise in a country whose economic travails have been well documented.

“In 2005, it was impossible to find Italian craft beer, but now there’s an Italian part to the story,” says Leonardo Di Vicenzo, from Birra del Borgo, a brewery at the forefront of the Italian scene located to the northeast of Rome. “Now imported beers from Belgium or the US are not so popular.”

Upon opening in 2005, Di Vicenzo set about changing perceptions in a country wedded to wine by focusing on using local ingredients where possible – grain, spices, even marine animals – and altering people’s attitudes.

leonardo-colori

“Italians don’t like to eat without drinking, so when they realised they could put beer [on the table] instead of wine it opened up a new world,” he says. “At the beginning the change was very slow then there was a big explosion. Now a lot of young people in the big cities aren’t interested in alcopops or industrial beers.”

Di Vicenzo is among the more experimental brewers, releasing monthly Bizzarra beers (March’s was a stout featuring oysters and clams) and is currently working on a champagne style beer that will be a blend of one of his regulars with a locally produced Sangiovese wine.

He is also a good friend of Baladin’s Teo Musso – one of the Italian beer pioneers – and Sam Calagione, the man behind leading US brewery Dogfish Head. Among their current projects is the development of an ancient beer that each will ferment in a different vessel – terra-cotta, bronze and wood – at their respective breweries.

Del Borgo beers made their Australian debut during May’s Good Beer Week, where they appeared as part of an Italian tap takeover at Beer DeLuxe and were the stars of a tasting at Slowbeer in Richmond. They are being imported to the country along with a host of other new Italian breweries, including BrewFist, Croce di Malto and Birrificio San Paolo, by expat Australians John and Kerrie Latta. They moved their young family to Italy with his work, began importing wine and, completely unexpectedly, found themselves slowly drawn into Italy’s “underground” beer culture.

“We live in a wine area, but one that’s also big on craft beer,” says Kerrie. “One of our friends was brewing at a local brewpub so started introducing us to the great craft beer in the area. We started drinking more beer and visiting craft beer festivals and found it very different. We’d started importing wine and that was going OK, but when we gave a few people a call in Australia to tell them about the beer we found that quite a few had heard about it and were quite surprised that the Australian market seemed ready for it.”

Their experiences reflect di Vicenzo’s comments: that the beers being produced by the smaller craft brewers – many of whom run tiny operations – are often designed with food as much as refreshment in mind.

“People treat it with the same respect as wine,” she says. “The other thing is that they are deeply into their ingredients. Their beers are treated like any other food stuff – they source amazing ingredients, such as chestnuts from some food producer in the mountains that are roasted over a fire in an old stone hut!”

Many of the beers in the Latta’s first shipment included herbs, spices or grains designed to make the beers distinct or have a link to their place of origin. And if there was a defining characteristic to them – whether the beer was a strong Belgian-inspired ale, a hoppy brew with eyes fixed firmly on American styles or the stout made with oysters and clams – it was that they were refined, a characteristic that spreads to the packaging too, with many of the beers now arriving here coming in beautiful 750ml bottles.

Certainly the industry shows no sign of letting up and, following far greater than expected interest in their first shipment, the Lattas have added even more breweries to their second, including Troll, a tiny brewpub in the Italian Alps, and Scarampola, found in the grounds of an old monastery.

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