Lombardy, the Italian queen of craft breweries

Published 2024년 11월 25일

Tridge summary

Lombardy leads Italy in craft breweries, with 140 out of 1,200 nationwide, producing 600,000 hectoliters of beer in 2022. Notable breweries include Birrificio Lambrate and Birrificio Italiano. Craft breweries in Italy produce under 200,000 hectoliters of unpasteurized beer annually. The sector has matured post-Covid, facing distribution challenges due to cold storage needs. While some breweries distribute nationally, most focus on local markets. Despite a growing interest in local ingredients, 90% of hops are imported. Lombardy is developing local hop cultivation with seven experimental fields in various provinces, supported by regional authorities to enhance local supply chains and promote beer as a Made in Italy product.

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Original content

Lombardy is the queen of craft breweries. The numbers from Unionbirrai speak for themselves: with 140 companies out of a national total of around 1,200, this is the Italian region that hosts the most hop entrepreneurs and which in 2022 produced around 600 thousand hectoliters of beer. Milan is home to one of the pioneers of the sector, Birrificio Lambrate, founded in 1996 by Professor Giampaolo Sangiorgi. The same year, in the Como area, Birrificio Italiano was founded. In common, these, like all the other craft breweries in Lombardy, have the following dimensions: based on European legislation, brewing companies that produce less than 200 thousand hectoliters of unpasteurized beer per year are considered “craft”, «but in our country even the largest companies reach decidedly smaller numbers», explains Simone Monetti, general secretary of Unionbirrai, the association that brings them together at a national level. Which also dispels a myth about the average age of the owners: «It's ...

Source: Ilsole24ore.com