Lombardy, the Italian queen of craft breweries

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 ...