Bards and pirates are we

During that first 10 years, Teo travelled all over the world, discovering and sourcing beers for his loyal patrons, and along the way met titans of brewing such as Greg Koch of Stone, Sam Calagione of Dogfish Head, José Dehard of Brasserie d'Achouffe, and Jean-Louis Dits of Brasserie à Vapeur, learning and being inspired. Then, in 1996, he made the fateful decision to set up a tiny brewery of his own.

This decision went down about as well as you’d expect with Teo’s father, a farmer in a part of Italy that feels a lot like Burgundy or Champagne; endless vineyards, as far as the eye can see. Alvise, a former oenological technician himself, quips there are three acceptable careers here: “Wine, working in the Nutella factory, or joining the priesthood… So Teo really got into brewing to piss off his father. ‘I'm young. I like rock and roll. I drink beer, and I'm gonna make beer.’ And it worked — they didn't speak to each other for three years.”

Dad wasn’t the only one losing patience with Teo’s ambitions. Since there wasn’t enough room for Teo’s nanobrewery in the pub itself, he decided to set up shop in the neighbouring garage. The only problem with this plan was that the garage’s owner, Teo’s landlady, was sunning herself on a beach in Liguria at the time, and — as it turned out on her return — had some fairly strident views on breaking and entering.

Even as the lawyers were untangling what Teo had done though, he was getting into the pub at 2am to start the day’s brew. He even knocked through a window, so his friends in the pub could watch him at work; a feature that’s practically mandatory in today’s brewpubs, but felt completely novel at the time.

At the end of each day, he’d load his latest batch of freshly fermented beer onto his pickup truck, and drive it to his parents’ chicken shed for hand bottling. Again, this lasted about a week before the forces of environmental health pointed out what a terrible idea it was, and Teo was forced to make other arrangements. I gently ask Alvise if there’s any part of Baladin’s origin story that doesn’t involve Teo pissing off everyone he meets. 

“We are basically 35 friends whose objective in life is, you know, to challenge people,” he laughs. “We do things by friction. It gives you a lot of power, you know? It gives you a lot of force, a lot of energy. But that was necessary… Teo’s one of the few real geniuses that we have in Italian craft brewing. Forget cars and motorbikes; in Italy, we are good with those. But with food, wine, beer, it takes a bit more effort, because it's an agricultural land and there’s an expectation that things will be done in a certain way.”

Back to the land

Baladin released its first (and Italy’s first) bottled craft beer in 1998, and its profile regionally, nationally and internationally rose quickly. This was partly thanks to the media’s love of Teo himself — charismatic, eloquent, and somewhat piratical — but also because the beer was perfectly brewed, and designed with a profound understanding of Italian food and drink culture.

“Teo’s real vision, his genius move, was to make a beer just like his parents made wine,” says Alvise. “He understood you have to go back to the farm, to the land, and grow all your ingredients to make beer. Again, everyone told him it would be a pain in the ass, which just made him more determined, so he did it.”

Teo himself explains why this approach to beer as an agricultural product was (and remains) so important to him: “I started to reflect on something that was fundamental to me, showing that beer is a product of the land. And I decided to take an absolutely mad path, to become the first independent brewery to start from the earth itself, building a supply chain – planting barley, creating experimental hop fields – and today we produce 85% of our raw materials, 80% of our energy is self-produced, and we’re completely independent in terms of distribution.”

Such is Baladin’s influence on the country’s entire craft movement, the Italian government later created a specific designation for farm or ‘agricultural’ breweries which produce their own ingredients. There are now several such breweries around the country, and the model has become a calling card for Italian craft.

“I think one of the slogans we’ve stood by, ‘modern craftsmanship for a 100% natural beer’, captures the concept quite well,” continues Teo. “All our beers are refermented in the bottle – it’s a bit like a champagne method without disgorgement – so this allows the product to evolve and stay vibrant for a very long time, always with spectacular aromas.”

Field to table

Over the years, this philosophy has extended into every area of Baladin’s operations, from its adoption of renewable energy sources to its promotion of circular local economies. 

“We’re all obsessed with food,” continues Alvise. “At the brewery, we have this big farm where we cook anything that moves, basically. And we give all the spent cereals to an organic pig farm, which sells the meat back to us. We serve the pork shanks. And the same with the beef; we give nutrients to natural beef farms just around the corner, which sells us meat for our burgers. It’s fantastic, beautiful meat and it all makes sense.”

Food isn’t just an interesting footnote to Baladin’s story though; it’s been central to the brewery’s success, and the positioning of craft beer in Italy’s wider drinks culture. Alvise recalls joining the business from his previous job, selling wines into some of Europe’s best fine dining restaurants. 

“I asked Teo ‘what do you want me to do?’ And he just says ‘exactly what you’ve been doing — I want you to sell my beers in all the Michelin star restaurants… if it's good for them, it's going to be good for all the good gastronomy places, this new generation of chefs that are raising their own orchards.’ He was talking about this a decade before it was a thing — that’s what I mean by vision,” says Alvise.

“I'm basically the Jehovah's Witness of craft beer; I travel all over the world knocking on doors… We're doing very, very well, exporting to 60 different countries, and my customers are all chefs, sommeliers and some beer enthusiasts. The truth is, we make gastronomic beer; the balance, the elegance, the longer fermentation in the bottle, so you don't feel the alcohol. The bubbles are very thin because of the attenuation, so it doesn't bloat you. And it's all natural, you know, which is a plus, no pasteurisation or filtration, no stabilisers.”

For this storytelling brewery, it’s only fitting that our story circles back to Teo’s father for its conclusion. Because, having first been animated by a need to run far and fast from constraints of the rural Italian life, Teo ended up building a new and exciting tradition on those very same strong foundations.

“This place – which was the brewery where we made Baladin beer from 2000 to 2008 – was actually my parents’ henhouse,” he says, proudly. “In the ’70s they kept laying hens in here. My father was a winemaker, he spent his life in the vineyard. And I totally betrayed what his path was – and the territory – by making beer. But here in this cellar I’ve made beers dedicated to the world of wine, which age in barrels from the greatest Italian wines, as a kind of reconciliation with my father.”