Sun and earth

“So we’d decided to give up on the brewery,” continues Chiara. “Then we received a letter from a cousin, a letter that was written by my late grandfather, Fernando Zecca. In it, he wrote about working in a brewery in Switzerland, how passionate he was about the job, how he loved being in the factory and working with so many fellow villagers. You can probably understand that receiving that letter did not feel like a coincidence, we felt it was like destiny.”

Reinvigorated, Maurizio and his family pressed on and finally opened the doors to Salento in 2017. Its goal was to create local craft beers which, in Chiara’s words “describe the land fully”, starting from the raw materials in the fields surrounding the brewery. Working with a local university to identify the best strains of barley and hops for the hot Puglian climate, then with local farmers to cultivate these tricky new crops, Salento set about building its own supply chain from scratch. 

Chiara explains it’s been a wild and rapid journey, though it’s not over yet. As well as setting up an agricultural cooperative among the many local farms which make up Salento’s 300 hectares of crops, it has built its own malting house opposite the brewery, opened in November 2024, giving it complete control of its grains from field to glass. Its hop fields – stocked mostly with hot-climate-friendly Californian varieties – will be getting the same treatment soon, with plans in the works for a new oast house, for stripping, drying and bailing the hops closer to their source.

In 2022, it was certified under the Italian ‘agricultural brewery’ programme; a respected mark awarded to breweries which produce a significant majority of their own raw materials. Between the brewing itself, running a major farming cooperative, and researching crops that have no historical basis in the far south of Italy, one feels that Maurizio, Chiara and the rest of their relatively small team have earned the kudos.

“It has been a lot of work,” says Chiara with a shrug. “I always think, it's impossible, that it's only seven years. Certainly it wouldn’t have been possible without the passion of the family, because we have always worked for the territory, for the land, and for the strong connection we have to our local area. Finishing the malt house was a huge step, but we still have a long path to run.”

One of the key factors in Salento’s success in converting so many wine drinkers to craft beer has been what could be described as a kind of cultural seriousness around beer. For a start, it set up with the most advanced equipment and largest capacity it could; the brewery itself is astonishingly beautiful, and looks more like a winery than any UK industrial estate brewery. It also invested heavily in quality control, kitting out a high-end laboratory and earning every safety certification under the sun.

But there was a cultural investment to make too, as Chiara explains: “We knew we needed to foster a new kind of beer culture, starting from the local area that was not ready for this kind of drink. So for example, in the first years, we organised every week free tours of people to our brewery. The only possible way to convince people of the work and care that goes into our brewing was to bring people here and let them see what's behind the process.

“So our biggest victory was that; getting past this idea that beer is simple and trivial. We also did a lot of beer and food pairings, which were also very important in changing perceptions. Wine is obviously good for tasting, having so many aromas and such complexity, but beer can be the same.”

With much of Italy’s craft brewing industry – and certainly its modern hype breweries – clustered in the north of the country, Salento has emerged as a standard bearer for the south. As an agricultural brewery, it is proudly of it place and of its people; not only does it believe in the terroir expressed through its water, barley and hops, but it also makes extensive use of indigenous fruit and spices. A drink that tells the story of its origin through all the senses is something wine-loving Italy can really relate to, and the rest of us can simply enjoy being transported to this magical corner of the world.