Writing this on the afternoon when we welcome the cream of Italian sport to do battle on our national fields - the power and grace of Matteo Berettini, the resilience of Giorgio Chiellini, the acting skills of Ciro Immobile. So I thought I would reflect on the historic Italian contribution to beer. And, as always with our Italian friends, all roads lead to Rome.
We start with the historian Tacitus, who wrote that “the Teutons have a horrible brew fermented from barley or wheat, a brew which has only a far removed similarity to wine”. The Emperor Julian hated beer so much that he composed a poem.
“Who made you, and of what?
By sweet Bacchus I know you not
He smells of nectar
You smell of goat”
Yes, I know, it doesn’t rhyme. Maybe it rhymed in Latin. And even if it didn’t, pointing out to a Roman emperor that his poetry didn’t rhyme was not a career - or life - enhancing pastime.
The social history of the Roman elites is clear - wine was their drink. If you were Roman, or part of the culturally assimilated elite of native peoples, you drank wine. In Britain we were part of a trading system governed by a common set of laws which carried goods freely all around Europe (an interesting idea that might be worth a second go some time), so the best wine was freely available. Beer was for barbarians who didn’t know any better.
This did not stop the Romans appropriating it. They called it “cerevisia”, which is of the same root as the Gaulish “cervoise” and the Spanish “cerveza”. It shows the success of the Roman ability to tell the story as winners that many websites state that this was named after their goddess Ceres. So far as I can tell, it wasn’t. There are similar Celtic words for beer - with various spellings - that pre-date Roman occupation. As previously discussed on this blog (see “Beer Witch Project” https://www.londonbiermeister.co.uk/blog/the-beer-witch-project-march-2021), it was normal for beer to be the gift from an earth goddess to women. It was also normal for the Romans to shoehorn their own gods into popular culture. So this was Ceres elbowing out her pagan sisters, and the similarity of name was a happy coincidence.
And yet, according to archaeology, beer was a feature of the Roman world as well, in Britain and elsewhere. Excavations in Colchester Roman town show unmistakable signs of brewing. Ditto the encampment of Castra Regina on the Danube. Delve into this and you understand why. The lazy narrative is that the Roman soldiers were issued with “wine”. Actually they were issued with something called “acetum”, which basically translates as “vinegar”, which had to be diluted to make it drinkable and which was also used to purify water. This leads us to “Atrectus ceruesarius” - Atrectus the beer merchant. We know about him because he appears in the accounts of the Vindolanda fortress on Hadrian’s Wall. The first British brewer in history. His product would not have been what we called beer - it would have been flavoured with a variety of herbs and no hops - but it was clearly preferable to acetum for the Roman soldiers (who would have been drawn from all over the Roman occupied world) huddled together in the cold wondering when the Scots were going to make trouble.
The Latin language later gave us the word “beer” - believed to be derived from monks sniffily describing it using the generic word “biber”, which just meant “a drink”.
But what of post-Roman Italy? There was some monastic tradition. St Benedict composed his famous rules at the Abbey of Monte Cassino in the 6th century. He was very much in favour of beer and brewing - beer was nutritious, and brewing was useful to the community. His rules included the famous monastic "Did You Spill My Pint rule", decreeing that any monk who spilled beer should be made to stand upright all night.
Then there isn’t much to record for quite a few centuries. It appears that beer was imported into Italy from the Germanic world. Brewing re-emerged with the Risorgimento - the revival of the Italian national spirit in the 19th century. Cavour. Garibaldi. Verdi. Peroni. Yes, that one. Giovanni Peroni founded a brewery in Lombardy in 1846. He wasn’t the first - that distinction goes to Baldassare Ketter in 1789 - but his impact has been one of the most enduring.
And finally, Italy joined many other countries in developing a craft beer tradition in the last couple of decade. I am told that Italian chestnut beer is what my son would call “a thing”, but cannot vouch for it. I can personally vouch for the Birra del Borgo brewery, which is based in Borgoroso near Rome, and whose product I would urge you to try.
But English beer is still, on the whole, better. Go Gareth. Go Harry. It’s coming home...