If you start ticking off the great European brewing nations in your mind, France clocks in — by dint of the bière de garde style alone — perhaps eighth. Italy likely doesn’t rate at all. Italy and France have so much going for them artistically and gastronomically that beer seems at best a marginal consideration. (This is true inside those countries as well as out.) In reality, though, Italy’s new breweries may be Europe’s most vibrant and eclectic, and France is not far behind.
Of the two, France’s tradition is much older, being centered in the region around Lille, which is snuggled very near the Belgian border. Brewing dates back to a point in history prior to the creation of Belgium, when control of the region was traded among various European kings. Barley, wheat, and hops have been grown there for centuries, and Lille was one of the main centers of ale brewing in a band that ran east through Brussels and Cologne. It remained a major center until the early twentieth century, when lagers began to insinuate themselves into the French palate. Then came World War I, with a major front that cut right through this area and effectively wiped out French brewing. By the time the breweries were rebuilt following the two world wars, lager had become the default position in France, and ale breweries had to conform to modern preferences.
Italy never really had a beer culture. Austrian control of central Europe stretched at times into Italy, and lager brewing gained a small foothold with such breweries as Peroni (1846) and Moretti (1859). These breweries made the same types of light lager that proliferated throughout the world in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and there was nothing uniquely Italian about them.
The revival came first to France, in the 1970s, when breweries like Duyck (Jenlain), Castelain (Ch’ti), and La Choulette reintroduced ales — sort of. Their beers, which borrowed a name common before the world wars, bière de garde, are more closely related to bocks than anything else. They were malt focused, strong (6 to 8% ABV), and lagered. And popular. They helped steer the French back toward ales, making them more receptive to Belgian styles and eventually sparking a renaissance of small breweries that now make a broad range of more typical ales. They run the gamut from English- to American-style ales but lean toward rustic Belgian varieties and often incorporate local fruit, herbs, and spices.
Italy’s new breweries didn’t get started until just a couple of decades ago, in 1996, but they quickly developed lineages with distinctly Italian contours. Now they make fruity, hoppy lagers; balanced, complex sour ales; and hoppy ales that are lushly flavorful. They have been inspired by Belgium principally, but they have also borrowed from the United States, England, and Germany. What links Italian and French beer producers is a love of food and a philosophy that instinctively creates beers to accompany local cuisines. If the hallmark of American brewing is intensity, in France and Italy — no matter what the style — it is complexity and balance.
Unlike many of the more famous brewing regions, these qualities may seem at times ineffable, but give them careful attention and you will begin to see how truly accomplished the beers from these two countries are.
Rich, not intense, hopping. French hops are not well known to Americans, but they have been used to great effect to add an herbal quality that works as well with traditional bières de garde as spiced wheat ales. In Italy there’s a whole lineage devoted to hoppy beers ostensibly in the American mode, except that the fruity, vibrant flavors are always more balanced and less intense.
Gentle malts. When you think of the French love of bread and pastry, it’s not surprising to learn that French malts are possibly the world’s best. They make delicate, billowing base malts that are so soft and flavorful that bières de garde remain balanced even with almost no hopping. Italians also prize softer malts, generally eschewing crystal malts in favor of rounder base malts.
Balanced tartness. Both French and Italian brewers have embraced farmhouse ales that are only brushed by wild yeasts. But it is the Italians, using their knowledge of winemaking, who make the most accomplished tart ales in the world. When I traveled through Belgium, brewers there kept mentioning this to me — and it turned out to be exactly right. Italian wild ales are balanced by other flavors and never dominated by overly sour notes.
Subtle use of spice. French and Italian breweries seem to use spice in the brewery like they do in the kitchen — instinctively and gently. They also have a proclivity for local spices that give their beers a native taste.
This list could continue on, though the elements become ever more subtle — and this underscores the nature of the beers from these two countries. They are constructed of many subtle flavors rather than relying on any one. Yeast esters, water hardness, dry hopping — any of these elements may also contribute to the overall success of a beer, but they are like extra voices in a choir. Before you make a French or Italian beer, think of ways to add a pinch of flavor here and a pinch of flavor there — these styles depend on many small contributors to achieve their overall fullness of flavor.
Americans have long slotted French bières de garde in with Belgian saisons in a single catchall category of “farmhouse ales.” This is wrong, both historically and stylistically. The rustic beers made in farmhouses across the Nord-Pas-de-Calais did once very much resemble the rustic beers across the border. In the early twentieth century, lagers were beginning to replace farmhouse beers, and then came the First World War, which cut a swath directly through the heart of that brewing region. When local brewers were finally able to begin to reconstitute brewing decades later, after the Second World War, the lineage of rustic ales had been severed.
When breweries started up again after the wars, they largely took up the low-alcohol lagers that were popular with industrial workers. When breweries finally returned, ever so tentatively, to ales, they made products that used lagers as their reference point, not the old funky farmhouse ales. They were elegant and smooth, lagered to a burnished refinement. (In French garde means roughly what lager means in German — “to keep or store.”)
Duyck was the first to make such a beer, with their popular brand Jenlain. It created the template for the modern bière de garde, and breweries such as La Choulette, Castelain, and St. Sylvestre began making similar versions. Bières de garde are typically strong, from 6.5 to 8.5% and very much malt forward. Some may have a trace of hops, but none has anything approaching insistent esters. Indeed, modern bières de garde are so much like lagers that they have much more in common with bocks than they do saisons.
The little town of Aix-Noulette has barely four thousand souls but has long been an important location in the heart of the French brewing region. Long before brothers Stéphane and Vincent Bogaert joined Hervé Descamps to found St. Germain in 2003, Aix-Noulette was home to the Brasme brewery, which at one time made around two hundred thousand barrels of beer. An old tin Brasme sign hangs in the tasting room at St. Germain, and when Stéphane begins to tell the history of his brewery, he goes back much further, recounting the history of brewing in Nord-Pas-de-Calais, the rise of modern bière de garde in the 1970s, and, gesturing at the sign, the importance of their predecessors. Even beer people don’t really think of France as a beer country, but Descamps and the Bogaerts mean to change that. “Everybody [in France] thinks Belgium when you say beer,” Stéphane explains. “In this region we are not so famous compared to Belgian breweries — but the history is the same.” To bring the focus back on local ales, St. Germain shows how truly French beer can really be by sourcing all their ingredients from the fields around the brewery. (There are very few places on earth where that’s possible.) That even includes sugar from local beets (don’t tell the English breweries), as well as chicory — a local specialty — and rhubarb. There are some limitations, though. Although France has some of the best barley and wheat in the world — no surprise in a country famous for its boulangeries — there are only a handful of local varieties of hops, though St. Germain is getting good at working with this narrow range.
And what looks like a limitation to the brewery has the effect of tasting like house character. While many of the classic bière de garde producers make beers with almost no hop flavor, St. Germain looks for a richer balance. Something about the local terroir produces rustic, herbal hops (similar to ones grown 40 miles away in Belgium), and in my favorite of the St. Germain beers, Page 24 Réserve Hildegarde (in two versions, pale and amber), the hops add a delicate flavor somewhere between lemon rind and wildflowers. Bières de garde are not powerfully flavored beers, and neither are St. Germain’s. But they are the most characterful of the traditional types, and the closest to the American palate.
Saisons and bières de garde are often clumped together in a category only a marketer could love — “farmhouse ales.” It’s wonderfully evocative but doesn’t tell you anything about the beer. And anyone who’s sampled saisons such as Blaugies’s and Dupont’s as well as bières de garde such as Ch’ti, Jenlain, and La Choulette can attest to this: they don’t taste anything alike. They do share a common history, but the lines diverged nearly a century ago. The reason is war and its aftermath.
When you drive around the countryside near Lille, you see cemetery after cemetery — the dead, buried near where they were killed in the horrible trenches of World War I. The battlefields are scattered throughout this region. The day I visited St. Germain, we were greeted by folks from Brasserie Castelain and ate lunch near a cemetery of Canadian dead. What the First World War didn’t destroy, the Second helped finish off. By 1945, 90 percent of the French breweries had been destroyed.
When ales started coming back to the Nord-Pas-de-Calais, they bore a striking resemblance to the beers that replaced them — and looked nothing like the saisons across the Belgian border. Although most modern bières de garde are ales, they are big, heavy beers, from 6.5% up, and always focus on a velvety smoothness. Cold fermentation and lagering help bring this about, and the resulting beers, burnished and malt scented, are so soft you can’t perceive the sometimes mighty alcohol cosseted within the malty folds.
The classic bière de garde is a light-amber beer (ambrée in French) of around 7% alcohol, though there’s actually a family within the style. Alain Dhaussy of Brasserie La Choulette believes this is a holdover from the nineteenth-century ales that were boiled for hours. Blonds and browns (brune) are also common — though blonds are a postwar innovation. From a sensory perspective the most important element is malt, and if you can source French grain, you’ll get a more authentic profile. I find French malt and wheat to be redolent of a bakery; it even seems pillowy on the tongue, like a nice baguette. Specialty malts give ambers a toasty or caramel note and browns notes of dark fruit, toffee, or brown bread (and never roast).
Most of the bigger names in bières de garde make their beers with nearly no hop character. Since so many of them date back 30 years or more, this seems to be an artifact of the flavorless lager age, and as tastes evolve, some bières de garde are getting spiced with a delicate layer of herbal hops. Buy a bottle of Saint Sylvestre Gavroche or Duyck Jenlain Ambrée or La Choulette Ambrée and see how they manage to make big beers (they’re all 7.5% plus) palatable, with next to no hopping. They’re big, bouncy beers, generally quite thick bodied, yet they are eminently drinkable. The balance is between alcohol and malt, not malt and hop. When breweries such as St. Germain do add grassy hops to the mix, they’re an accent to this typical balance point.
According to tradition, the essence of bière de garde is lagering, even though the effect is subtle. It creates the smooth balance the style is known for. It is so subtle that some breweries lager only for 2 to 3 weeks (St. Germain), though others still conduct crazy-long lagering (Castelain goes for 6 to 12 weeks, depending on the beer’s strength). Cold lagering has the effect of creating clarion beers, and this is another important benefit (bières de garde should never have a rustic cloudiness). Some people, when tasting bières de garde, find fruity elements (tasting notes often mention peach, dates, grapes), but these usually come from the malts, not the yeast, and I harbor a theory that the slow lagering helps encourage them. (This is only a theory.)
Vincent Bogaert, StÉphane Bogaert, and HervÉ Descamps
St. Germain
St. Germain recommends fermenting with Safale S-04 yeast, a strain from Whitbread, at 75°F (24°C). (Wyeast 1099 or White Labs WLP017 are good substitutes.) Lager as cold as possible (down to freezing) for 3 weeks.
Bottle-condition or keg after lagering.
Notes: The most unusual element of this process is the very high mash rest at 165°F (74°C). This is designed to preserve unfermentable sugars that give bière de garde its smoothness. “Bières de garde are mostly sweet and not too hoppy,” Stéphane Bogaert says. “It can help in having a more rounded beer with a strong body. The difficulty is to have a nice balance between maltiness and bitterness.” Two rests at 145°F (63°C) and 165°F (74°C) are unusual — but so is a bière de garde.
Bogaert recommends Castle Malting’s 25 EBC Munich, but substitute any 10L version you can find (French and Belgian are the best). The hops used at St. Germain are actually grown locally. Since you’re not going to find the Brewer’s Gold and Goldings that grow around there, you can substitute French varieties. Strisselspalt is the classic French landrace hop, but newer varieties Triskel and Aramis are available. The suggested yeast will create noticeable fruitiness at 75°F (24°C) — a quirk of St. Germain’s house character. If you want a more neutral palate, ferment colder or try White Labs WLP072 or Wyeast 1007. It’s even kosher to use a lager yeast when making bière de garde (Wyeast 2112 is a good choice).
St. Germain offers a relatively low-alcohol formulation for bière de garde. This recipe scales up without many difficulties. For an 8% bière de garde, shoot for about 45 IBUs to keep the balance point in the same place. You can vary the color by tinkering with the pilsner/Munich blend. La Choulette uses medium amber crystal and a tiny dash of black malt to add color. For bigger bières de garde, add a week for lagering at a minimum.
There is a way to bring a bit of the past into modern bières de garde without changing their character. It is suggested by La Choulette’s Alain Dhaussy when he noted to me that “the use of special [crystal] malt gives more color and a more or less pronounced taste of caramel to recall the long cooking of the beginning of the century.” But of course, you can also achieve this with the “long cooking” that was typical of breweries 150 years ago. Boiling wort will eventually darken it. Laymen call this “caramelization,” but the wort is actually going through a Maillard reaction as it deepens in color.
If you start with pilsner malt, it will take several hours to deepen it to amber. Along the way, though, the wort will pick up flavors you can’t get any other way: sweet berry and honey notes along with rich, portlike ones. Interestingly, the process doesn’t result in caramel flavors. Long boiling also has a pronounced effect on the feel of the beer. It creates a thick, velvety texture, one very much in keeping with modern bières de garde.
If you attempt a longer boil, there are two things to keep in mind. First, you’ll need to start with a lot more liquid if you want to end up with 5 gallons. How much? That’s hard to guess and depends on the dimensions of your brew kettle, heat intensity, ambient humidity, and other factors. Some homebrew algorithms use 14 percent per hour as a standard evaporation rate. At that rate you’d need to start with 9 gallons of wort to end up with 5 gallons of beer for even a 4-hour boil. But those calculations start looking very different if your evaporation rate is only 10 percent. Of course, all of this is going to affect your gravity as well. My recommendation is to start modestly and add water back to the boil if needed once you’re within spitting distance of the end.
The other consideration is hops. According to Lacambre, nineteenth-century brewers regularly boiled their wort with hops for the duration of the boil. (Of one long-boiled beer, he wrote, “The taste is far from being very pleasant indeed, for it is bitter, harsh, and somewhat astringent.” After a marathon boil with hops, I don’t doubt it.) I’d skip that. Gigantic Brewing makes a beer each year called Massive! that they boil for 9 hours. They hop as you would any beer, with the bitter charge going in with an hour left in the boil. Given the heightened sweet flavors and heaviness that comes from the long boil, you can start with 90 minutes left in the boil without adding unnecessarily harsh flavors. Ninety-minute hops have a slightly sharper quality, as though they’ve embedded their lupulin claws more deeply into the beer.
In his famous account of mid-nineteenth-century French and Belgian brewing, Traité Complet de la Fabrication des Bières, Georges Lacambre described his encounter with the bières brunes des Flandres:
Boiling of these beers is longer and stronger than uytzet: commonly the boiling of these beers is 15 to 18 and even 20 hours in many breweries. The aim here is especially to color the beer, as well as [adding] stability and the special flavor that the wort gains by this long boil.
(Translation by Randy Mosher)
Long boils were very common in Belgium and France at the time. Especially in Flanders, where Lacambre found this beer, drinkers prized long boils. A 9-hour boil will turn a beer made with pilsner malt ruby; one can only imagine what happens after 20 hours. The flavor is distinctive as well, and while some unscrupulous brewers stained their worts with the mineral lime, they couldn’t counterfeit that “special flavor” any other way.
As we saw in the previous chapter, the modern tradition of French bière de garde was a reboot of an older, more rustic beer dating to the early twentieth century, also called, confusingly, bière de garde. That earlier line may have been severed, but memory of it was not. As Belgian saisons — themselves barely rescued from extinction — began to revive themselves across the border in Belgium, brewers such as Thiriez and Brasserie Au Baron wondered about France’s farmhouse history. Was there a way to reconstruct the French farmhouse tradition without just importing it wholesale from Belgium?
The result was a melding of old and new. The French tradition of laying down strong ales in a manner similar to lager had become a point of national pride (there was even talk of an appellation d’origine contrôlée), and this element is a fixture of brewing in the Nord-Pas-de-Calais. What changed was the emphasis on yeast character and a more florid flavor palette. Rustic French ales are fermented warmer with wilder yeasts than traditional bières de garde to produce layered flavors of esters, phenols, and funkiness. French brewers have also rediscovered their love of herbs and spices, as well as rustic grains. These hybrid bières de garde are not as offbeat as Belgian saisons; they still aim for the smoothness and balance of the older ale-brewing tradition. They have taken a middle way, a road that may well lead to the future.
Like many folks in Lille, in Nord-Pas-de-Calais, the heart of the French brewing region, Daniel Thiriez found his way to beer through the bières de garde that started gaining popularity in the late 1970s. His parents were pilsner drinkers — typical for most of the twentieth century — but when Thiriez tried Duyck’s Jenlain, his understanding of beer changed. It planted a seed in his mind that grew over the 11 years he worked as a human resources manager at a local company. In the mid-1990s, he began to wonder whether he could make a living brewing characteristically French farmhouse ales, with a Belgian twist.
“My idea was very simple: Northern France has a long tradition about brewing, and most people enjoy beer very much, but there were few traditional remaining breweries (Jenlain, Choulette, Ch’ti), and the bière de garde style was sort of limited, with smooth, rather strong and malt-oriented beers. So I was convinced that the style, combined with the Belgian saison style, could offer different beers: drier; more drinkable; more balanced between cereals, yeast, and hops; lower alcohol; more bitterness. I also had the influence from some British ales and bitters (even though local people do not appreciate [them]).”
He found a rustic little building that had been a brewery in Esquelbecq and began working on the formulation for a beer with those qualities. The most important step was finding a yeast strain. Thiriez’s came from the Institut Meurice in Brussels, which maintained a large collection. He worked with the director at the time, Alain Debourg, to find exactly the strain that would bring Thiriez’s vision to life. The one he settled on is familiar to American brewers and homebrewers — it’s known as the “French Saison” strain at Wyeast (3711). That choice was propitious; not only did it make Thiriez the leader of the “new” bière de garde tradition, but it helped create an entirely new palate in France.
If rustic French ales are just a move back toward older forms of farmhouse ales, aren’t they just a version of the Belgian saison? Yes and no. Brewers such as Thiriez admire the Belgian tradition enormously. Indeed, the French are enamored of the beers of their smaller neighbor, sometimes to the exclusion of their own ales. Thiriez cites saisons, abbey ales, and gueuze as his central influences.
But brewers of the Nord-Pas-de-Calais see themselves as very much part of the French tradition. Even when they don’t brew classic French bières de garde, brewers acknowledge their debt to them. Hence rustic French ales are typically lagered (or garded) at cool temperatures. This has the effect of smoothing the beers and softening the edges. The French seem more interested in hops than the Belgians as well. Together, the slightly less vivid yeast expression and more insistent hopping place them closer to the American palate. If you’re looking for the “French” in a saison, experiment with lagering times. Thiriez recommends a relatively short period, but aging a month or more will produce subtly different results.
Thiriez’s range includes a line of hoppy, characterful farmhouse ales. In addition to sporting herbal bouquets, they are earthy and etched with a tracery of lemony-to-lavender esters and just a hint of wild funk. They seem the very definition of “farmhouse” but feature approachable flavors that give them broad appeal. Breweries in the United States have agreed, and although everyone acknowledges Dupont’s primacy in the world of saisons, Thiriez’s are actually the kind of rustic beers American brewers more often emulate. When you see a “saison” on the menu at your local brewery, it may owe a greater debt to Thiriez than to Dupont.
Daniel Thiriez is a name known to very few Americans, yet he has nevertheless had substantial influence on American brewing. His yeast was the source of Wyeast’s 3711 strain, one of the first commercial saison strains available, and one that brewers love for its familiar citrus esters. It has changed somewhat since it was cultured by Wyeast, and Thiriez points out that it is hugely attenuative, unlike his. (Some brewers have seen their saisons approach 1.000 terminal gravity.)
He nevertheless recognizes it. “Some flavors may be rather close,” he acknowledges. As Americans have developed a taste for saison, they are more attracted to the esters that are like those in the 3711 strain than in Dupont’s much funkier phenolic yeast.
Rustic French ales form a continuum, not a style. Three things to consider are strength, color, and hop use. The classic French ales are amber or “ambrée,” but you also find blonds and browns. Traditional bières de garde are strong (6.5–8.5%), but rustic ales are occasionally less so (some are as low as 5%). Finally, rustic ales typically exhibit at least some hop character and may be quite bitter. Other variations include the additions of spice or mixed yeast strains that include Brettanomyces. The one thing that links all these various elements together is lagering followed by bottle conditioning.
This recipe for rustic French ale is similar to Thiriez’s Blonde d’Esquelbecq. France is home to some of the world’s best barley and wheat, and Thiriez recommends using it if you can find it. (It’s so good, even Germans sometimes use it.) He is less finicky about using French hops, but you might consider substitutions if you can find them; French hops display a unique herbal terroir that accentuates the Frenchness of these ales.
Daniel Thiriez
Brasserie Thiriez
Ferment with Wyeast 3711 at 72°F (22°C) for about 5 days. Cool to 54°F (12°C) and condition for 2 weeks; finish out with a week at around 40°F (4°C).
It’s best if the beers go through a secondary fermentation in the bottle at room temperature. This is the classic presentation, and the secondary fermentation will substantially change the beer’s ester profile.
Notes: Thiriez recommends French spring barley for the pilsner base malt. He prefers French-grown Brewer’s Gold hops and Strisselspalt from Alsace for the ambrée (see Next Steps). Since these are hard to source, substitute English Brewer’s Gold for the French and Mt. Hood for Strisselspalt, with adjustments to proportions depending on alpha acids. (If y.ou can source any French-grown hop varieties, consider those as well. Thiriez is much impressed with Alsace-grown Triskel and Aramis.)
After the initial fermentation, ABV will be around 6.1% but will rise to 6.5% after secondary fermentation in the bottle. Because the 3711 strain is so much more attenuative, I’ve had some luck slowing down fermentation by racking after it has dropped to 1.015. Because the esters develop early in fermentation, you don’t lose much character by hitting the brakes at 1.010.
If you want to try a classic French amber, Daniel Thiriez suggests these substitutions. For the malt bill, 75 percent pilsner malt can be combined with 12.5 percent light caramel (50–60 EBC/25–30 L) and 12.5 percent medium caramel (100–120 EBC/50–60 L), or 10 percent Vienna or biscuit malt along with 7.5 percent each of light and medium caramel. Mash and hopping schedules are the same, except Thiriez recommends Strisselspalt in place of Saaz for aroma. The target IBUs are 25 rather than 35. He does not personally use spice but suggests bitter orange peel, coriander, or cinnamon “in very limited quantities” to accentuate the flavors.
One of the typical amber bières de garde will taste especially smooth because of the caramel malts and long lagering time. With a rustic interpretation you’re going to add some yeast character that will nudge it in the direction of a saison. Keep in mind that caramel malts and rustic yeasts don’t harmonize especially well; start fermentation at 68°F (20°C) to inhibit the formation of esters and phenols. This is not an easy beer to brew well, but it makes for an absolutely wonderful autumnal tipple if you can pull it off.
Superficially, Italian lagers may resemble their forebears to the north. They have the same colors and names, and their labels may even have the same Gothic scripts favored by Bavarian breweries. But put them to your nose and tongue for analysis, and you find subtle aromas of orange blossom, say, or rose — and possibly more than just a few hops. They taste fuller and richer and contain narrow shafts of fruit flavors.
Like Americans, Italians had no national tradition to hinder them, so they freely borrowed not only from Germans and Czechs but selected practices from the English and American repertoire as well. But the thing that makes these beers so characteristically Italian is their luxurious balance, a fact that is highlighted perfectly when these beers come into play at the dinner table.
It is not often that you can find a single source for anything, but when you write the history of Italian lagers, you start with Birrificio Italiano. Modern Italian brewing dates back only to 1996, when two pioneers began the two lineages that now characterize it. The ale line was founded by Teo Musso, and it was Birrificio Italiano’s Agostino Arioli who cut the path to lagers.
When he was about 20, Arioli began homebrewing (“because I was a lazy student,” he jokes). As his hobby became more serious, he followed his interest to Germany where he took classes that would help him as a brewer. He bounced around learning the trade in Germany, England, and Canada before opening Italiano. His first beers leaned heavily on his original German influences, but he didn’t stop there.
His most famous beer, Tipopils, is characteristic of his multinational approach. “I [had] visited some English brewers and studied some more about English cask beer. I knew that they were using dry hop in the cask. I thought, why don’t I do this with my Tipopils?” The finished product is something like a German kellerbier crossed with an English cask ale. It is intensely aromatic, full, and rich — one of the best pilsners made in the world. That’s not just idle praise, either; it was an enormously influential beer, creating a standard for Italian lagers that many other breweries follow. And not just in Italy: Matt Brynildson readily cites Tipopils as the inspiration for Firestone Walker’s Pivo Pils.
In my travels throughout the beer country in the north of Italy, I kept encountering beers that were amazingly balanced, no matter what the style. The hoppy beers were not too hoppy; the sour beers were not too sour. It is not a characteristic that the brewers even seemed aware of. Eventually, after much prodding, I got Arioli to ponder this a bit, and what he came up with was instructive. “These beers are beers you drink with your senses more than with your brain. Birra da meditazione — meditation beers. When you drink a meditation beer, you really think about it. ‘This taste reminds me of flowers; this taste reminds me of the food my aunt used to prepare me.’ So you’re really thinking about the beer.”
With lagers this means tweaking and pulling until you’ve extracted a bit of extra flavor from each element of the beer, always making sure to keep them in balance. I think this comes from the Italians’ instinctive sense of flavor. To use a food analogy, the Italians make beers that are like sauces simmered for hours with a complex blend of herbs and spices, not blazing preparations dominated by chili peppers.
Arioli agrees that it is a strong possibility. “In Italy we grow up where you can spend hours and hours discussing food. The whole family, we can discuss food for a long time. ‘This is better; last time was worse. It’s overcooked, or it’s too rare.’ Really, we talk about food a lot. We care a lot about food. So this probably automatically requires us to brew beers that can fit with our sense of what is pleasant, what is balanced.”
Italians are attracted to many of the same kinds of beers that Americans are, but the approach is not toward extreme flavors. Italian lagers follow the inclination of American lagers toward more flavor, but only to a point. If there are hops, they are not too bitter or aromatic; if there are esters from warmer fermentation, they don’t become a distraction. Think about all the possible elements that contribute flavor and amp them up a bit over the German approach — but all together, in a kind of symphony.
These beers are beers you drink with your senses more than with your brain. They are birra da meditazione — meditation beers. When you drink a meditation beer, you really think about it.
— Agostino Arioli, Birrificio Italiano
Italians don’t put down beer the way Germans do, by the liter. They prefer beers that are a little stronger, a little more flavorful, designed to be savored. At Birrificio di Como Andrea Bravi says, “I don’t drink a lot of beer — maybe one glass or two. So it should have a good body and be strong.” Arioli agrees. “When we are talking about lager, especially pils beer, Italian beers are more hoppy, more fruity, and also a bit more malty.” Tipopils certainly fits this description, but so does another of Arioli’s lagers, Bibock — an assertive, slightly smoky dark bock brimming with flavor.
Arioli’s approach seems to be to start with a German model and trick it out. Tipopils has drawn so much attention for its dry hopping, but it has other characteristics that make it distinctive. I think the most important element is fermentation temperature. “We ferment at higher temperatures, and this makes a certain difference,” Arioli says. While it’s typical to ferment in the middle 40s F (7°C), Arioli goes higher, as much as 10°F (6°C). The coldest he ferments is around 52°F (11°C). We know that higher fermentation temperatures produce more esters, but I think there may be more going on than that.
Arioli also dry-hops during primary fermentation with Tipopils. There may well be more happening with the biochemistry than just ester production — the hoppy character he gets is certainly unusual. It’s richer and more integrated, deeper somehow, than in any other lager I’ve tried. He dry-hops at very low levels (30 grams/hectoliter in primary, 70 g/hL during maturation) but nevertheless gets massive character.
Arioli is also far more attentive to pH than other brewers I’ve spoken to — and he likes it low (more on that in Next Steps.) He starts with a low mash pH and suggests adjusting your sparge liquor to a pH of 5.5. I was surprised by this, so he suggested an experiment. “If you adjust pH at the beginning, watch the results. Split your wort using natural pH versus adjusted pH.” He added, “Beginning fermentation pH is really important,” and he shoots for 5.1. I must have looked a little skeptical about this, but he smiled and joked, “Most homebrewers love suffering, so this is the right way to do it.”
Agostino Arioli
Birrificio Italiano
Ferment with a standard lager yeast at 52°F (11°C) for a week — Wyeast 2206/2308 or White Labs WLP830/WLP833 are great, or the strain of your choice. Dry-hop during primary with 0.25 ounce Saphir or Hallertauer Mittelfrüh. Mature for 3–4 weeks at 32°F (0°C). During maturation, dry-hop with 0.6 ounce Saphir.
Keg is best, but “re-fermentation in the bottle is not a catastrophe.”
Notes: To achieve a low mash pH, Arioli adds lactic acid. You could use lactic or phosphoric acid or substitute 5 percent of the pilsner malt with acidulated malt; use a pH meter or strips to assess the pH. Arioli also encourages a pH of 5.1 at the start of fermentation, which may require another acid adjustment. “Fresh yeast is critical. Do at least one starter; two is best.” Do not rack more than once. Arioli, fastidious about oxygen, says, “If you transfer from one carboy to another, evacuate with CO2.” (I guess he thinks you really want to suffer.)
The recipe above is fairly straightforward — if unusual — though Arioli would encourage you to experiment with malt and hop types as you wish. What I found fascinating with the recipe was Arioli’s insistence on acidifying everything as he went along. For most of the recipes in this book, I traded e-mails or sometimes phone calls with the brewers, but Arioli and I discussed this over pints of Deschutes beer when he visited Portland in 2015. That allowed me to witness firsthand just how committed he was to this pH issue. So let’s do some unpacking.
In the main, pH is one of those details that affects beer subtly; the chemistry more or less takes care of itself, which is why brewers were able to make beer long before they ever heard of a hydrogen ion. But different pHs can affect the way a beer feels and tastes, so adjustments in one direction or the other do affect the finished beer. In the mash, proteins and starches are broken down into simpler molecules by specific enzymes — and those enzymes work within different optimal pH ranges: glucanase (5.0), protease (4.5–4.7), and amylase (5.1–5.8). Water has a pH of roughly 7.0, but grains lower the pH within the mash. Brewers shoot for a pH that averages the effect, somewhere between 5.2 and 5.6 — and most mashes will naturally fall within that range.
There are a couple of reasons to pay attention to mash pH. Some malts, such as Munich malts or adjunct malts, are enzymatically weak and need higher pH. Decoction mashes should start out with a somewhat higher pH, 5.4 or above, because boiling the mash during the process will lower the pH. Higher mash pH also helps extract color (which ain’t great when you’re making a pilsner).
On the flip side a low-pH mash (5.2 or 5.3) has several benefits. It improves the efficiency of the process, lowers wort viscosity (which improves filtration), improves haze stability, and increases attenuation — all important in the commercial brewery. More important for the homebrewer are these advantages: low pH is believed to result in better flavor (more rounded and soft, yet crisp and characterful), a more pleasant bitterness, and denser, more lasting foam.
Arioli makes it a point to lower his liquor’s pH for sparging as well. Why? Because higher pH may extract tannins from the husk of the grain, giving the beer a harsh astringency (which, in slight beers like pilsners, can be observable). Tannin solubility is affected by both high temperatures (which is one reason to sparge around 170°F [77°C]) and water alkalinity. Below a threshold of 6.0, water won’t extract tannins. Arioli’s suggestion of 5.5 ensures no tannins are extracted.
In the kettle the central effect of pH has to do with iso-alpha acid solubility and its effect on the flavor of the beer. The higher the pH, the more acids are extracted. Many brewers feel that the bitterness from higher-pH worts is harsh, though. The same reaction that causes tannins to be extracted in high-pH sparges is at work with hop acids, so it makes sense. (A lot of what brewers believe, from the effect of first-wort hopping to low mash pH to low kettle pH, is based on impression, however. Brewers also felt high cohumulone hops contributed to a harsh bitterness — but when tested, researchers at Oregon State University found no correlation between cohumulone levels and the perception of harshness.)
Finally, during fermentation, yeast naturally reduces the pH of its environment (that would be the beer) while raising its own internal pH. The biochemistry of the way yeast works means that this difference (higher pH inside the cell, lower pH outside) makes it easier for yeast to take up maltose, resulting in a healthy fermentation. This is the moment Arioli suggests adjusting the pH experimentally — dividing the wort into an amended, low-pH batch and leaving a portion at its native pH.
Final comments: Keep in mind that pH is affected by temperature, and all the values listed here refer to room-temperature pH. There are various ways to test for pH, from relatively expensive meters to cheap paper strips, with predictable advantages and disadvantages to both. If you’re deeply nerdy and a lot smarter about chemistry than I am, John Palmer and Colin Kaminski get into water chemistry in very fine detail in Water: A Comprehensive Guide for Brewers.
For centuries and probably millennia, Italians have eaten chestnuts; whole surely, but often ground into flour from which they made bread and cakes. Chestnuts served as a kind of backstop during hard times, when famine or war put the wheat harvest in jeopardy. It makes perfect sense, then, that Italian brewers would think: “I wonder if you could make it into beer?”
You can. Grown throughout Italy, chestnuts are put into the service of any number of beer styles. Lagers, though, because they are more malt friendly and subtle, serve as the best platform for this kind of beer. Chestnut trees are in the same family as oaks, and the nuts are starchy like acorns. Their effect on the beer is as much tactile as anything. The texture is thick and silky — almost oily — a bit like oats. The flavor can be roasty or smoky depending on the way the chestnut was prepared, and I sometimes detect the earthy flavor of root vegetables beneath the more obvious notes.
Andrea Bravi at Birrificio di Como made a chestnut lager called Birolla. He sampled several different flours before settling on the one he liked best, one in which the chestnuts were roasted over beech and that is tinged with smoke. “First I mash the chestnuts at 75°C (167ºF) because the starch has to become gelatinized. Then we add the malt and water to get a good saccharification [preparing a typical lager]. In Italy people all have individual preferences, so I do milled chestnut, but someone else will use roasted chestnut, some others boiled chestnuts, some raw chestnuts — so, a lot of different beers.”
You can use raw, boiled, or roasted chestnuts to make one of these. (They’re gluten-free, and some breweries use them in place of wheat flour.) The flour is probably the easiest, and Italians make it for export. It’s not cheap, though, so experiment with a pound or two. Follow Bravi’s instructions about mashing, letting stand for an hour, and then adding to a traditional lager mash. I have found no information on the amount of sugars available in chestnuts, but it stands to reason that it’s less than barley — your final gravity may be approximate.
Italian ales fork into two traditions, but the tines are not especially far apart. The first and oldest was founded by Baladin’s Teo Musso, who cribbed very heavily from the Belgian playbook. At Baladin Musso makes ales that could easily sneak into a Belgian café unnoticed: witbier, strong dark ales, Belgian pale ales, and saison. His beers go through warm fermentations and spend a time bottle-conditioning in a warm room. Musso’s approach informed breweries that came afterward, and Italy for a time looked like a region of Belgium.
But eventually, the vibrantly hoppy beers of the United States exerted an influence on Italians. They shifted from a largely yeast-focused approach and started accentuating hops, and soon “IPA” and “American pale ale” began to appear on beer labels. They, too, were vibrantly hoppy — but they weren’t exactly in the American mode. Italian IPAs were lighter in color and body, dry, and not so bitter. They were marked more by esters than are American hoppy ales, sometimes intensely so, and the flavors were different: berry, bergamot, rose, apricot. By twinning the Belgian tradition of expressive yeasts with the American tradition of expressive hops, they managed to invent a native tradition all their own.
Before he imagined opening a brewery, Bruno Carilli worked in the food industry doing logistics and purchasing. When I asked him to describe his background, he recited that first bit with a kind of melancholy. His career took a turn when he started working for the brewing giant Carlsberg (in Italy), sparking his interest in beer. (Here his tone of voice took an upbeat turn.) While he was there, he learned a lot about hops — the relevance of which will soon be evident — and started homebrewing as well.
This gathering interest coincided with the Italian beer renaissance and led Carilli to leave the corporate life and open a little brewery in the town of Fidenza in Parma in 2008. Unlike some of the first-wave breweries that preceded him, Carilli didn’t have to experiment with different styles to find his voice: he came into brewing knowing exactly what kind of beers he wanted to brew. “I have always loved the hoppy beers,” he said, pointing to a lineup that includes seven American-style pale ales or IPAs. His first beer, not by chance, was called Re Hop (King Hop) — the label shows a regal hop creature dressed in an ermine robe.
Many Italian breweries are now doing hoppy ales, but a few, such as Carilli’s, Milan’s Lambrate, and Birra Del Borgo in Borgorose, have not only mastered the art of hops but have given their beers a wholly original twist. They are not derivative American knockoffs. Carilli, in particular, gets a distinctive house character in his hoppy ales that suggests tropical fruits with an Asian twist. He’s even able to do this with his saisons, another passion of Carilli’s. He experiments broadly, blending American, German, and South Pacific hops to create his fruity concoctions, which are unlike any beers you’ll find in America.
When American homebrewers began going pro back in the late ’70s and early ’80s, they had no template to work with. They were trying to figure out the beers even as they were making them. That was a major liability early on — a lot of the first microbrewed beer was pretty bad — but it came to be a huge asset. Freed from national tradition, they could pick and choose the techniques that seemed valuable. Italians were in exactly the same boat, with one exception — they could also crib from the now-extant American tradition.
Carilli agrees. “Our fortune is that we have no tradition, so we are quite free to experiment.” In his case, the three major elements of his beer come from three different national traditions. His original brewery resembled an English kit and was outfitted to handle post–kettle hop additions. He likewise regularly uses an English yeast strain (as well as the Chico 1056 strain so many Americans use).
But he also has a warm room, and every one of his beers gets a secondary fermentation there — even lagers. This is a big clue to how the Italians squeeze more fruit from the hops; they accent the fruitiness with esters. But unlike the Belgians, who regularly use sugar to thin out the body of their beers, most Italians use all grain. This means the malt base more easily supports a heavy load of bitterness. Finally, Carilli has an American’s love of hops, though he was ahead of most Americans by expressing that love through flavorful and aromatic late additions.
All of these collude to make hoppy ales that are lightly sweet, fruity, comparatively less bitter than American examples, and very aromatic. One of Carilli’s favorite words is “extreme,” and he sounds a lot like gung ho Americans who make hop tinctures and face-melting IPAs. But his beers aren’t actually extreme in the least. They’re full of flavor and aroma, but they’re soft and harmonious. This is typical for the Italian approach, where balance is a reflexive habit.
Think of brewing an Italian ale as using components from Belgian, English, and American traditions. Italians start by approaching the malts from a Belgian or German perspective; that is, rich base malts as the foundation of flavor. Carilli makes no secret of the influence American beers have had on him, but there is one thing he doesn’t love. “I only use pilsner malts in my beers. I don’t like so much caramel in the beer, so much body.” This is typical. Italian ales may have color, but they don’t have the density of some American IPAs nor the sometimes sticky crystal-malt sweetness. He takes a continental approach to adding color, using Vienna, Munich, or other noncrystal malts.
Italian ales may have color, but they don’t have the density of some American IPAs nor the sometimes sticky crystal-malt sweetness.
Next, Italians brew with simple step or single-infusion mashes. They’re looking for fermentability and a bit of flavor. I was surprised to find a wood-clad English kit at Toccalmatto (they have since expanded to a bigger, more modern brewhouse). Carilli brews a bit like an English brewer, too, adding an infusion of hops in postboil. This has become an American approach as well, but the Italians were often more influenced by British brewers and tumbled to this approach more quickly than Americans did. They hop like Americans, focusing on flavor and aroma additions later in the boil, and then regularly dry-hop during conditioning; again, like Americans.
Fermentation and conditioning are where the Belgian influence comes in. The main difference between Italian hoppy ales and American versions is the way Italians use esters to boost fruitiness. Carilli uses an English strain, and I suspect this is common; the ester profiles are more like English than Belgian strains. Carilli puts his beer through a secondary fermentation in the bottle, and this further enhances those esters that result in such sensual, fruit-forward beers.
Carilli was so busy during the writing of this book that he was unable to offer a recipe, so I’ve based the following on the information I collected when I visited Toccalmatto a few years back.
Based on recipes designed by Bruno Carilli
Ferment with Wyeast 1968 or White Labs WLP002 at 70°F (21°C) until you reach terminal. Rouse yeast after terminal, and let sit for 2 more days to absorb diacetyl.
Optional: Dry-hop with an ounce of Amarillo, Citra, or Galaxy, or a blend equaling 1 ounce.
Bottle-condition only, at room temperature for at least 2 weeks.
Notes: Use acidulated malt to soften hops. This hop blend incorporates some of the varieties I kept hearing about at Italian breweries, but obviously, it’s no more definitive than a blend in any American IPA. I included the controversial Sorachi Ace because it is a key hop in Carilli’s flagship Zona Cesarini — as is Citra. The use of a postboil infusion in either a hop back or whirlpool addition is mandatory. The yeast strain suggested is Fuller’s — different from the one Carilli uses — because it is lightly fruity but also reliable.
I haven’t had a chance to experiment too broadly with the myriad combinations offered by the different fruity yeast strains and hops available (a task that gets harder by the month as new hop varieties come on the market). Finding that precise blend of ester and hop oil could become a person’s life work — though what pleasant work it would be. Nevertheless, you can get fairly far down the road just using fruity yeast strains — and don’t foreclose the option of turning to Belgian yeasts — vivid hop blends, and bottle conditioning.
For Italians, the blending of traditions continues with hops. It fascinated me to hear how Italians regularly blended not only American and South Pacific hops but classic German varieties as well. This is part of that lack-of-tradition thing; Italians see no reason Hallertauer can’t be used in combinations with New Zealand and American hops. (Even among Americans, who have developed their own firm views of the “right” way to brew, this is a heterodox approach.) Blending terroir is another way Italians manage to pull unexpected flavors from their hop additions. Hallertauer and Tettnang were in rotation a few years back, and I wouldn’t be surprised if some of the new varieties, such as Hallertauer Blanc, Hull Melon, and Mandarina Bavaria, are now getting a workout.
In addition to ales that trace their influence to California and Belgium, and lagers that look north to Bavaria, Italy has a third important brewing tradition: tart, barrel-aged beers. But if these appear similar to those made elsewhere in the world, don’t be fooled. This vein of Italian brewing takes its cues from the local art of winemaking. Not only did Italian breweries begin using Italian wine casks to age their beers, they began to take lessons directly from vintners, making beer that is as sophisticated as any made in the world.
As with all beers Italian, those made with wild yeasts prize balance above intensity; they are nuanced, refined, and with their restrained acidity, excellent with food. That last point is the key to why, even after such a short time, Italians were turning out some of the best sour barrel-aged beers in the world. They already understood what a balanced beverage could do at the dinner table, and they had winemakers, vineyards, and wine barrels close at hand.
The best example of how this process unfolded is with Valter Loverier at LoverBeer. Before starting his brewery, he began speaking with winemakers in his native Piedmont. It is common for vintners to use the wild yeasts on the skins of grapes to ferment their wine, and this gave Loverier an idea. Why not use those same yeasts to inoculate beer? That’s what he did once LoverBeer opened: he pitched grape must from Barbera d’Alba grapes, and put the batch into a wine foudre. The grapes not only inoculated that batch of wort but seeded the foudre with local yeasts and bacteria. Now the other batches of beer that spend time in that vat also pick up a little bit of Piedmont. “This is the philosophy of the brewery: to join, to have a fusion of the old recipes of the Flemish area, sometimes forgotten, with Piedmont winemaker’s, and so we use wood, fruit, grapes.” (This process is described in Part 7, Brewing Wild.)
Few have taken it as far as LoverBeer, but Birrificio Del Ducato, Birra Del Borgo, Birrificio Montegioco, Torrechiara (Panil), and others all make excellent, wine-barrel-aged sour beers.