THIS IS HOW WE BREW IT

We select our ingredients with the utmost care: we respect the raw materials and try to know them in depth, in order to catch their essence and convey it into our beers.

Our malts are sourced from great European companies with whom we have built over the years a privileged partnership, and tested batch by batch. Each sample is individually tested in our internal laboratory in order to understand its features and quality level: we also run test brews for every batch of malt before using it for the beers we put on the market. We buy most of our hops from Tettnang, and in particular regions of Slovenia.

Every year, when the harvest is ready in September, we travel to Germany and dive into a world of incomparable aromas. We sample all the batches of freshly-harvested hops, source the ones with the most peculiar aroma profiles, and try to guess how these scents will be transferred to the finished beer.

We exclusively buy hop cones, which we then send to a small private pelleting plant: this is the only way in which we can be sure that we are using for our beer exactly the hops we want, that we selected personally and we know, deeply, in every aroma nuance.

How is beer made? The heart of the “alchemic process” lies in the transformation of sugars contained in the malted cereals into alcohol. In order for this to happen, a series of steps has to happen.

1) Milling

The main ingredient of beer, apart from water, is malted barley. Malting is done in specific plants and is needed in order to unleash enymes which will break the long chains of complex sugars into simple sugars, which the yeasts will be able to “digest” and transform, in turn, into alcohol.

2) Mash

The malts are mixed with water in a kettle and progressively heated. The sugars contained in the malts are extracted, the enzymes attack starch and break it down into simpler, fermentable sugars.

3) Lautering/Sparging

The wort is poured into a lautering tun. For some beers, the temperature is brought up to 77º C in order to stop the action of enzymes (“mashout”). In some cases, the wort is pumped from the bottom of the tun and poured on top of the malt husks in order to get rid of some grain/proteins residue. Finally the husks are washed with warm water (“sparging”) in order to extract the leftover sugars.

4) Boil

The wort, now separated from the husks, is poured back into the tun for the boiling process. During this phase hops are added. Many compounds responsible for the aroma and flavor in beer are formed, while the liquid is sterilized from the possible presence of bacteria and other microorganisms.

5) Whirlpool

The finished worth is poured in a specific tun called a “whirlpool”, a tun equipped with a rotating shovel, able to move the wort by generating a whirlpool at the center of the kettle. By result of the so-called “teacup effect”, any solid residue (proteins and hop fragments) falls at the center of the tun so to be easily eliminated.

6) Cooling

After whirlpooling, the wort is pumped through a plate heat exchanger in order to be cooled. Once the temperature gets to somewhere between 8 and 30ºC the wort is ready to be fermented.

7) Maturation

After primary fermentation, the beer can be matured in several different ways. It can be moved to low-temperature tanks where the yeasts can keep working very slowly and favor the creation of complex aromas and clarity, for instance, or be moved to wooden barrels with the addition of other ingredients (fruit, sugars, different kinds of yeasts), or again, bottle-conditioned with sugars and yeasts.

8) Consumption

Once finished and kegged or bottled, our beer is stocked at controlled temperature and shipped. From that moment on, it stays refrigerated at our pubs and retailers until you will pop it open; in order to enjoy it by yourself or together with a friend.