ARIES s.r.l.s. — Microbirrificio Artigianale Aries

The path is the classic one of Italian craft brewing, but here it is longer than average: about a decade of homebrewing, then the specialist courses, and only afterwards the opening of the brewery. You move from passion to business when you have learnt enough to guarantee the same result twice in a row.

That is why a small microbrewery can afford a wide catalogue: whoever is behind it has already botched every brew there was to botch, at home and at their own expense.

The names follow a system. The first beers take their names from the four elements: Aqua, Aëra, Tĕrra, Fŏcus. Then the repertoire widens and moves upwards — Jupiter, Venus, Mercurius, Saturnus, Neptunus, Andromeda, Ophiuchus.

The name of the brewery is in there too: Aries is the Ram, the first constellation of the zodiac. The criterion is so consistent that two beers have ended up with two names: Fŏcus is also called Mars, Tĕrra is also called Neptunus. It is a range that changed sky along the way.

June 2018. The first beer comes out, Aqua. The first sixty bottles come out with a special label, not for sale, dedicated to Ruby and Raffaello, a couple from Fucecchio who had been together for sixty years.

Sixty bottles, sixty years. It is the first gesture of a brewery only just born, and it already says everything about the kind of business it will be: one that knows the names of the people in the town where it works.

The declared method is made of refusals. No additives. No preservatives. Unfiltered. Unpasteurised. And a formula worth quoting exactly as it is written, because it says something precise about the relationship between haste and quality.

«Ours is a production of beers that are unfiltered, unpasteurised, not stressed by processes that could alter the qualities of the raw materials, always chosen with care, with a natural maturation that respects the time a proper fermentation needs.»

Translated: maturation is natural and takes the time it needs. Refermentation happens in the bottle or in the keg. It is also the reason why there is a haze at the bottom of the bottle — that is live yeast, not a fault.

The company lists them without skipping any, and they all happen in house: selection of the raw materials, milling of the barley, mashing, separation of the wort from the spent grain, hopping, whirlpool, addition of the yeasts, primary fermentation in the fermenter and secondary fermentation in the bottle or in the keg.

«From barley to bottle» describes a company that contracts nothing out. For a microbrewery it means that every mistake is theirs and every credit is too.

The plant is a brewhouse with a two-and-a-half-hectolitre boiler, and four cylindro-conical fermenters. All stainless steel, all temperature controlled.

They are small numbers, and they should be read for what they mean. Two and a half hectolitres per brew means short batches, no stockpile, and the real possibility of making a single beer a single time — which is exactly what an industrial brewery cannot do.

Fucecchio lies between Firenze and Pisa, on the route of the Via Francigena, and the brewery leans on it explicitly. But the real rootedness shows in the calendar: Salamarzana, the town's medieval festival; Monteluppolo in Montelupo Fiorentino; Autumnia in Figline Valdarno; the Beat Festival; an evening of pairings at the Osteria Montellori, a stone's throw from home.

Then there are the long trips — Artigiano in Fiera in Milano Rho, Pitti Taste in Firenze, Artigianati in piazza Santa Croce. But the base remains the short round, the one where you pour the beer yourself and whoever drinks it knows you by name.

The line the brewery chose as its motto speaks of where the raw material comes from, and of what it is expected to become.

«Dalla natura…le bollicine più buone»