Craft Beer

In Tuscany the breweries were almost all founded after the year two thousand, and they have spread differently from the historic manufacturing districts: they do not cluster in a single place, but follow the water, the available industrial units and the markets that consume them.

The coastal strip — Livorno, the Pisan seaboard, the Versilia — has a density tied to restaurants and tourism, with breweries that often open beside a taproom. The Firenze and Prato area works instead with an urban public and with a network of wine bars and shops that has learnt to treat beer as it treats wine. In the inland provinces, from the Mugello to the Val d'Orcia and on to the Maremma, the breweries are smaller and more closely tied to the agricultural raw material of the place: chestnuts, ancient grains, honey, fruit.

This geography also explains the type of plant. Those in the city work with modest volumes and rapid turnover; those in the countryside produce fewer batches and keep them maturing for longer.

The brewer's craft is today divided into two figures that the public often confuses. There are those who own a plant and work on it, and those who design the recipes and have them produced at somebody else's plant — the so-called beer firm. Neither is illegitimate, but they are different jobs, and it is worth the buyer knowing which one is in front of them.

The surge of the 2010s has settled: growth through new openings has stopped, and selection now rewards the breweries that have built stable distribution and a quality that can be repeated batch after batch. Direct sales — from the brewery, at markets, in the places that pour on draught — remain the channel that best sustains the margin, because it skips two steps and allows the product to be told while it is being poured.