Travel stories — Ma Che Siete Venuti A Fà

Ma Che Siete Venuti A Fà on the night I visited 

So it’s like the early part of 2014, the first week of March to be exact, and on a sunny Saturday morning I’ve just boarded the 6.59am train from Rimini that goes all the way to Rome and gets in at half ten, and I’ve never been to Rome before but I’m only there for 36 hours, the first of three cities I’m going to visit by train over the next six days, on assignment for a travel article, so it’s Rome first, then Florence, and I’ve never forgotten the time back in 1990, when I drove from London to Tuscany via Paris with a then girlfriend and when we got to Tuscany I kept seeing signs for Firenze and wondering where it was, and I’m going to finish off in Venice where naturally I’m going to be thinking Don’t Look Now and funeral boats gliding along the canals, though back in Rome, I have a job to do and that’s about wandering through the famous places with my notebook and jotting down impressions, people’s behaviour, overheard conversations (English of course, my language skills diminish by the day) and which restaurants and bars can be recommended, but by the early evening, I have a full notebook and it’s time to relax and I go to a bar, which is an easy choice for me because I have wanted to go there for several years.

So six years ago, Italian craft beer was cool stuff, was becoming established, and Ma Che Siete Venuti A Fà in the Trastevere district was seen as one of the coolest bars in the country, which was where I went twice during my very short stay in Rome, first time on the Saturday evening where I felt it had the feel of compact log cabin, a couple of rooms, wooden floor, chalk board with names of beers, lots of Lambrata, whose beers I have always enjoyed since visiting the brewery in 2008, and there was a real sense of a pub about the place, which was a contrast to the chrome and minimalist craft joints that were springing up all over the UK (well ok London, Leeds, Manchester etc), people greeting each other and I sat at the bar watching Ireland play Scotland in the Six Nations, while the music of Nick Drake played in the background and a couple of Brits talked about sour beers close to me. 

Next morning, Sunday, I went back, after visiting the Vatican Square where people were gathering for something or other, and it was the first day of the bar’s famous Franconian beer festival, which if I hadn’t have to get a train to Florence, would have been my home for a few hours, but I still managed to spend 90 minutes reconnecting with the previous night’s pub atmosphere, in the company of several beers including Schlenkerla’s dark chestnut coloured Fasten Bier, which had a quiet and reflective smokiness on the nose that somehow made me think of a wooden box that had once held smoked herrings ready to be shipped out of an old Hanseatic port, while the palate had an appetising smokiness and a malt stickiness, all of which were as well integrated as the parts in my Apple laptop, but were much more exciting, and as I drunk deeply of this beer I knew that if I didn’t leave soon I would miss my train and there was this slight tremor of rebellion about throwing everything up in the air and just changing my life, but that moment passed and a couple of hours later I was in a five-star hotel in Firenze/Florence/whatever ready for the next stage of my journey.

Have you ever found a pub or bar so sublime that you have considered throwing up in the air all your best laid plans and thought I’m staying? I have several times but that’s a different story. 

The long dead cohabit with the restless living and the beer list just keeps improving

Mercato di Mezzo, Bologna. It’s calm and careful, gustatory, as a Sunday evening of couples promenade with late night kids in tow, delighted as mum and dad lift a glass to toast some fortune or other (but the laughter will be stilled when the reveille is called in the morning), and then I spot a chef grilling, the word calamari pinned somewhere on the stall, followed by the fairground-tough aromatics of fried food elbowing their way through the elegant air, calamari, prawns, gloved in batter, crisp and salty and dotted with lemon juice. I order and then grab a table and look across and see the sign for Birra Baladin. I keep an eye on my food and order a glass of Super Bitter, as far from a traditional bitter as can be. The imperious wave of a conductor (Toscanini rather than the metronomic tick-tock of von Karajan thank god) brings the scent of deep, rugged, sensual orange marmalade to the nose alongside a spear thrust into the side of bitterness; almond, marzipan and sweetness on the palate start their descent to be cut off by an assertive bitterness, sticky almost, a big beer that beams in with a missile-like accuracy on the salty, citrus, crunchy, still briny impact of the seafood. As I crunch and sip, I sift through the weekend and recall the bitterness of White Dog’s American Pale Ale at Saturday’s farmers’ market, beneficially bitter, robust and yet mellow. Then I remember Friday night and the barman (and brewer) in Birra Cerqua, where at the back of the small bar there stands a kit of Italian-built stainless steel, while fermenting vessels cower behind opaque glass panels to my right (I told you it was narrow). A glass of Q-Ale, made with German malt and English hops I am told. It is pale gold, hazy, bittersweet and refreshing. ‘We brew on Sundays.’ Another result of this work is the rye beer, earthy and erudite. Back to Sunday, the day when the brewers of Cerqua are busy, the dominant vibe of Mercato di Mezzo as I look about are glasses being raised, the aromatics of fried fish, the deep undercover agents of cured meat and aged cheese and the empty, thin-sounding, TB-cough of an empty coffee carton as it rolls off on the empty floor. Later on, it’s time for Green River, another one room bar, a place that could have been a butchers’ (yet there is no smell of blood in the air), or perhaps it was a tailor’s, where each morning a mournful man washed the portico-shaded front of his shop with the dedicatory air of a penitent, or perhaps it was just another bar. Green Petrol from Brewfist, a Black IPA, smooth, robust, roastiness leashed, citrus flutters amongst the darkness, an ideal metaphor for Bologna, where the long dead cohabit with the restless living and the beer list just keeps improving.

Wine. Beer.

What is the attraction of wine? Is it the acidity, the tannin-like firmness that keeps the palate in check, the colour, the collaboration it undertakes with food, its lack of sweetness, and maybe its antiquity? We in the North like to drink something associated with antiquity, we like to feel part of the Mediterranean civilisation from whence wine came, while those in the south of Europe might like to feel part of the North by drinking beer (or maybe they just like to wind up the older generation) — the perceived hardiness and warrior status of the North.

Then I ask — what is the attraction of beer? The length of its assignation in the glass, the join of sweetness, bitterness, dryness, fruitiness and — sometimes — sourness, the collaboration it undertakes with food, the patchwork palettes of colour. Oh and yes its antiquity. We in the North like to drink something associated with antiquity, we like to feel part of the North by drinking beer — the perceived hardiness and warrior status of the North. We also like to feel part of our history and heritage (a word I don’t really like using, it’s too National Trust for me) by drinking beer. 

And then I think of the beers I have drunk in Florence, Rome, Venice, Malaga and even Lisbon in the last few months; beers from the wine countries, beers that are artisanal, produced on a small scale, looking northwards for inspiration and motivation. And then I think: what is the attraction of beer? What is the attraction of wine?

Beer House Club

There’s a beer club having a meeting at the front of the bar here at Beer House Club in Florence. Tonight it’s stouts that are being discussed and tasted, which is just as well as there are several on the taps (dry, imperial, oatmeal). Outside in the streets of Florence I passed a couple of bars that were pledging their troth to St Patrick’s night, which in one instance meant green and white balloons around the entrance and in another the promise of green beer. Here however at the Beer House Club there’s a glass of their own brewed Imperial Stout in front of me, a deep dark mahogany beer with a fluting of cascade and roast on the nose and a rich fullness on the palate. Another glass appears with the same beer in it, though this one has had dried ginger added during the rest period of fermentation. It’s 12 months old by now I’m told, but its ginger character is mellow and herbal, a gratifying addition to the creamy and appetisingly dry finish. People still like their IPAs I am told by the guy behind the bar, but late at night, he continues, they turn to Weissbier, maybe, he continues to muse, it’s something to do with the brisk carbonation and the quenching nature of the beer that makes it so effective after a meal. There’s a fridge full of bottles to the left of the bar, with beers from all over the place. I spot Demon Hunter from Birra Montegioco, a beer that appears in 1001 Beers, but which I have yet to try. It’s 8.5%, has a firm foam, and a blast from its nose can only be considered as mocha with hops. Meanwhile, the beer club continues its discussion and outside in the streets of Florence St Patrick’s night takes a downwards curve and the green and white balloons move ever so slowly in the night air.  

Teo Musso

This is part of the Boak & Bailey inspired Go Longer idea and was written in 2008

Jesus turned water into wine, but Teo Musso at Le Baladin has gone one step further — by changing beer into wine. At his bar in Piozzo, a small village high up in the Piemontese hills above the Barolo wine country, he proffers a glass of Xyauyu, a dark, almost black powerfully alcoholic ale (13.5%) that has spent 18 months sitting outside in a container in the courtyard at the brewery. Exposure to air has led to the beer going through a period of oxidisation, which in most cases is sudden death to beer, but here the process has alchemically altered the beer in the most sensational way — it has gone through the valley of shadows and death and come out totally transformed.

Viscous and limpid in the glass, it is warming and sherry-like on the palate, complex and blessed with a restrained but comfortable sweetness: an elegant and esoteric beer that has taken on the character of wine. It is strong, 13.5% in strength, and the drink-by date on the bottle says to be consumed by the end of the world. Clearly, Musso is a man with his eyes firmly fixed on beery nirvana.

Even though wine is king in the country of Italy, craft beer is taking pot shots at the throne, challenging the old hegemony, especially in the style bars and brewpubs springing up in the north. Here in the beer homelands of northern Europe we always think of Peroni and Moretti whenever the subject of Italian beer crops up, inoffensive premium lagers with big advertising budgets and nothing much to get worked up about. However, it is now estimated that there are approximately 150 breweries and brewpubs in Italy, a number that will probably keep growing. Le Baladin, which has been going since 1996, is often seen as the star of the show with Musso as its leading light.

He certainly has the aura of a man who believes his own publicity (‘he is the Jim Morrison of beer,’ I am told by one Italian beer writer). He is tall and rangy, draped in a long scarf, leather-jacketed, stick thin, heavily stubbled and blessed with the sort of distressed, windswept hair that must take forever to do in the morning. Even though he’s in his early 40s, there’s a boyishness about him, an enthusiasm, a sense of adventure or exploration, plus a easy charisma — he greets people in his bar with the sureness of one of those infuriating people who seem to have limitless self-confidence. When we meet he is still thoroughly amused over the battle he had the previous day with a Carlsberg Quality Control Manager at a beer seminar they were both talking at. Ask him about beer and the last thing you will hear will be marketing double-speak.

The home of Le Baladin’s beery heaven is the bar of the same name where the brewery first started. Nowadays, the beer is created (produced doesn’t seem an appropriate word for what he does) in a stand-alone site across the village square and down a side street. In May 2008, it will be all change again as the current brewery will be solely for experimental beers, with the regulars being created elsewhere in the village. For the moment then the brewery remains an adventure in stainless steel, comfortably sited within a nest of tiled walls and floor. 85% of his beers are bottled because he believes that is the best way his beer can be presented, especially when it appears on the beer list of smart restaurants.

Many hail him as a genius, though others of a more conventional stripe might think some of Musso’s ideas as thoroughly bonkers. For a start, most of the fermenting vessels have headphones attached to them. This is due to Musso’s belief that as yeast is alive it can respond to music, in the way newly born babies like a spot of Mozart. There is even a tango guitarist who has composed movements for the different phases of fermentation. Along with the regulation barley and hops, various spices, chocolate, coffee beans and even myrrh go into the brewing pot, while top-fermenting yeasts are joined by strains that usually work with whisky or wine. 

Then there is Musso’s latest creation, the Casa Baladin, which is a beer restaurant and hotel across the square from the bar, a unique stronghold of beer cuisine and seven luxuriant rooms all individually decorated to a theme. The Flowers Room is dominated by an incredible three-metre deep brass bath that was brought from North Africa; the Jewels Room is hip and minimalist, while the 70s one is lurid and psychedelic. You get the picture (one of the other beer journalists I was with used the words ‘knocking shop’). There’s also a Turkish bath, while the high-ceilinged lounge continues with this mixture of modern and fantasy: old weathered beams hang over the proceedings, a metal chimney rising out through the roof has the feel of something out of 1001 Arabian Nights, some of the seating comes from an old Paris cinema. ‘I want to transmit experiences to people,’ he says.

This is the sort of room that would be an ideal winter’s night experience with a glass of the brewery’s chestnut-coloured Noel Baladin to hand, a sensuous Christmas ale that has become so popular it is now brewed all year. However, in keeping with Musso’s brewing contrariness, the recipe is changed annually. The 2007 vintage that I try has coffee beans in the mix, while 2006 saw chocolate being added. ‘Next year I don’t know what I will do,’ he laughs. Noel is nutty and alcoholic on the nose, with a hint of vanilla and ground coffee beans in the background. The palate relaxes with a rich and rummy smoothness that is woken up with an appetising espresso-like bitterness. Musso hands around a plate of truffles to accompany this glorious beer; they have Noel within them. Never mind about chocolate liquors, beer is the new confection accessory in town. ‘I like to challenge the way beer can be used with chocolate.’

Challenging our perceptions of what beer is and can be is what Musso is about. His Belgian-style witbier Isaac has a tart, sourish edge to the palate; Elixir is an Abbey-style ale that is fermented with Scottish distillers’ yeast, while Nora contains ginger root and myrrh and is hopped as lightly as Italian brewing laws will allow — it’s weird in the it’s-a-beer-Jim-but-not-as-we-know-it mode and absolutely delicious. The Italian spirit of adventure and inspiration that drove the likes of Marco Polo and Da Vinci are very much alive in Teo Musso. ‘Every week I think in my head a new beer and every two months I try and brew one,’ he says. ‘A new taste is like a new way of communicating with people. My beers try to communicate new flavours and aromas to people. I never get bored with brewing. I am like a volcano spewing out new ideas. I could never be a wine producer because there I could only expect to be creative once a year, while in beer you can be creative all the time.’

Tasting notes

Nora, 6.8% — dry, spicy and refreshing

Brune, 4.7% — chewy, smoky and creamy with toffee notes

Super Baladin, 8% — strong Belgian-style ale with a candy-sugar sweetness on the palate; chewy, bittersweet and silky with lots of malty flavours

Blonde, 4.9% — honeyed, tart and herbal

Isaac, 5% — delicate and subtle with hints of spice and a quenching sourish edge

Nina, 6.8% — ESB style, which is quenching and chewy

Sei no 6, 5.2% — made with a special mineral water; dark gold in colour, it has an estery, sour, gueuze-like nose, with lemony hints; has spices and buckwheat in the mash and is fermented with a wine yeast.

Wayan, 5.8% — light and subtle with a gentle carbonation, dryish; ‘I contaminate the beer with lacto-bacteria and then bottle and secondary ferment’.

Elixir, 10% — sweetish, has a hint of Belgian triple about it but not as hoppy; sharp and prickly in its carbonation; a dry and fiery triple that doesn’t have the sweetness of the more common Belgian ones.

Erika, 9% — dark orange in colour, made with heather honey and also has pine resin added to the boil; not overly sweet, has a nose that can be compared with like being in a forest after a rain shower; rounded, restrained bitterness, bittersweet dryness; very drinkable.

Beneath Bologna

Bologna. Ambling up from the station, the town centre a target. Two friends embrace on a crossing, while a patient taxi driver waits — the amiable anarchy of Bologna. A middle aged man cycles by whistling accompanied by the staccato clack on heels on the marble floor as a woman rushes by — late for her train perhaps? Sound is all around. Conversations, melodic highs and lows, echoing beneath the high ceiling porticoes, dashed and splashed with the unsigned frescoes of the city’s artists. In the old city centre, Osteria del Sole — bring your own Mortadella and bread and cheese and order a glass of Theresianer Pils and listen to people talk: students discuss ways in which the world can be saved; couples pick at each others’ lunches, the intimacy of familiarity; the Goth/rock chick barmaid hands out a chopping board and knife; original artworks by patrons can be seen rolled out on the walls; the chatter, the clink of the glasses, the debates, the integration, the deliberation, the lack of the iPad.

Later that day, a stroll out of the centre into the Birroteca La Tana del Luppolo (which apparently translates as Lair of Hops), small, a shop that is now a bar, to be found in a precinct like area. Above the wooden bar, the chiselled, hewed, carved, birthed from the earth wooden bar, an empty barrel hangs, its fangs forever drawn, a signifier that beer is the diet here. Two dogs engage in the corner, a small funny bundle of pup fur and a Dachshund cross. Blanche des Neiges, Birrifico Italiano Cinnamon Bitter and La Rulles Estivale on draught while lots of bottles hover in the fridges. Big open window, the street passes by and I’m told it was a home brew shop before it went into selling beer at the bar. And to come there is a story that includes BrewDog, Flying Dog, La Senne, St Feuillien, Rochefort, Thornbridge and Brewfist who have been or will be turning up and the following night Agostino from Birrifico Italiano will be there as well. And then sitting there with my glass of Cinnamon Bitter I’m thinking about how during the day I visited the place where the canal that was part of the network that used to vein its way through Bologna emerges into daylight on Via Malcontenti, a hidden part of the city, a place where fast flowing waters cut through a frayed, crumbling, naked part of old Bologna before vanishing beneath another street and no one knows of its existence — and I think how like this subterranean network the beer culture of Bologna is. And I like that.

Beer and books

I’m in the middle of Bologna and on the top floor of the Ambassadors building at Librarie Coop, which advertises itself as a library but also seems to sell books; whatever its function it’s a place that seems like a pretty decent bookstore (think Barnes & Noble) — however on the top floor of the building there are shelves and shelves of beer, some of which I am familiar with in the UK, Belgium and the US, others are the aristocrats of the Italian beer scene. It’s pretty cool. The whole building is in what was once a church and there are the remains of the nave (perhaps it’s the nave or maybe I’ve lapsed on the lapse as I’m rather hazy on church architecture) at the end of one mighty wall. This space also did time as a porn theatre but now it’s only right that it’s dispensing all sorts of knowledge over three floors with the three tiered book store, a café and artisanal foods on the second floor and right at the top the bar and accompanying restaurant (the eating and drinking places going under the name of EatItaly), where are there beers that make me warm and fuzzy and rather glad I am where I am. I order a draft Forst Sixtus, a review of which I had edited in 1001 (an Italian copy of which I found downstairs); it’s a doppelbock that I had always wanted to try — I like its toasty, chocolaty character and a finish of (more toastiness) dryness. I then ordered a glass of the same brewery’s Heller Bock, pale and strong, fragrant and glasslike in its fragile dose of malt sweetness and hop bitterness. There is a clear explanation of the beers on draught on the wall, colour, strength, ingredients etc, and I just feel that this is so right — it’s a gratifying experience, a flying buttress of gastronomic joy that combines books and beer (and wine as well) in a way that only a book-burning teetotaller with no room in their heart for good food could turn their face against. As I watch the woman who served me my glass of Sixtus bend her elbow to the cutting, the sawing into chunks, of the evening’s bread for the diners to come, I was aware that my glass was empty. And waited until she had finished. Another please. Beer and books: would it be too much to ask for this to catch on in the UK?

I love lager and Tipopils is one of the best Pilsners in Europe at the moment

Some time ago a lot of loot is spent promoting Peroni with the fountain scene recreated from La Dolce Vita (well I suppose it wouldn’t work recreating a scene from Bicycle Thieves or Rome Open City). Why bother though, Birrifico Italiano’s Tipopils is the most glorious Pilsner in Europe at the moment (for me that is). A bottle finds its way to me and boy do I enjoy it (in company with last night’s Doctor Who). Poured into the glass it crackles and snaps on the palate, is big and bold in both nose and flavour; it’s a beer that stamps its own identity with a crisp and refreshing arrival in the mouth. It’s bitter and aromatic, dry and sprightly, fragrant, resiny, powerful, punchy (if you want to be technical a bright fragrant note mingles with a darker hop pungency on the nose, whilst on the palate it is clean and refreshing and expansive in the finish). It’s put into a 750ml bottle (the sort of bottle that is always tiresomely designated as ‘good for sharing’, but no one but me is having this beauty). I’ve visited the brewery whose nerve centre is a Swiss-looking tavern in Lurago Marinone, south of Como and I can recommend that the trip be made. Amber Shock and Bi-Bock are there for the taking as well, while at the right time of the year Extra Hop (see pic), can be found, which is served with a hop cone of Mittelfrau on the top of its foam. The crying shame about this beer is that apart from GBBF’s foreign bar, this glorious beer and others like it from the Italian renaissance are not available over here — whether that’s good (it means a trip and the widening of beer-drinking horizons) or bad (you fly and rack up the air miles), is up to others. I know that I hope to return next year, my palate can hardly wait.