Back to the fundamentals
In the wild world of Italian craft beer, Canediguerra is a straight arrow that’s always right on target
Richard Croasdale
Saturday 03 May 2025
This article is from
Italy
issue 117
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There’s a real humility to Canediguerra, the Italian jack-of-all-trades brewery that has built a stellar international reputation for its perfect renditions of an entire spectrum of classic, traditional beer styles. The brewery’s co-founder, Diego Boccio, accepts my compliment with grace, but half apologises that the brewery hasn’t dedicated its existence to mastering a single style, then fully apologises for having the temerity to brew a porter for a British beer club.
Diego has been in love with craft beer since the early 2000s, and first discussed opening a brewery with head brewer Alessio Gatti when the pair first met in 2006. Back then though, they were coming at their shared passion from very different directions, as Diego recalls.
“For Alessio, it was all about very thick and hazy beers, he was a real beer geek and a fundamentalist. I was on the other side, coming from marketing, very focused on the label and packaging, and creating something very accessible, so it was very difficult, almost impossible, for us to find a way to collaborate.”
Eight years passed, during which time Diego worked importing Italian food to other parts of the world, as well as opening sandwich bars and other ventures, and Alessio worked with some of the country’s most important breweries, including Bruton, Birra del Borgo and Birra Toccalmatto. When the pair met again in 2012, their different approaches seemed more like a strength than a point of conflict, and they decided to join forces.
“The idea since the beginning has been to make it easy for customers,” continues Diego. “In those early days, the craft scene in Italy was very confusing for people; breweries were not delivering, or even aiming for, a specific product. They were just experimenting and coming out with crazy beer in crazy styles; it often wasn’t even what they’d set out to brew in the beginning, so they’d just put a different label on it. That made it really difficult to let the customer understand what they were buying, what was the difference between one beer or the other, and between craft beer and commercial beer.”
Canediguerra set out to change this by focusing on technical brewing of traditional styles, sticking religiously to the accepted style guides, and labelling its beers in a way that is clear, modern and minimalist. There are no self-indulgent and whimsical craft beer names to be found here, only BOHEMIAN PILSNER, or BEST BITTER, with minimalist, geometric label designs.
“If you Google the style, and that’s not what you find in your glass, that’s our fault. In 2015 when we launched, that was a very different approach and people liked it a lot. In a market where the vast majority of breweries are coming out with a different IPA every two weeks, that was our niche.”
There’s real technical clout behind these beers, with a high-end brewhouse, laboratory, pilot line and a great deal of knowledge within the team. Interestingly (and perhaps slightly pointedly) Diego is very clear that the brewing team will always use the most “appropriate” ingredients for a recipe, even if they’re not Italian.
“If we want to do a Czech-style beer, we use Czech hops,” he says. “If we’re doing an English style, we use English hops. We almost never use Italian ingredients, because as a country we have a long road to walk on producing quality malt and hops.”
Yet for all this scrupulous attention to detail, Canediguerra can still let its hair down. Each year sees it team up with (generally like-minded) breweries across Europe, and as far as the Middle East and South America. Just last year, the team worked with the UK’s North Brewing, Big Smoke and Anspach & Hobday, all of which make perfect sense.
Yet for all this scrupulous attention to detail, Canediguerra can still let its hair down
“Collaborations are a great excuse for us to come out with some creative new recipes. These are one-shot beers, and we know they’re not going to be perfectly on-style, but that’s not the point – it’s about meeting other breweries, having fun and giving our customers something a little bit different if that’s what they want.”
The picture emerging from my conversation with Diego is one of a brewery that’s quietly creating excellent, consistent beers over the course of a decade, in a way that doesn’t intimidate anyone, while also having some fun with its friends along the way. So at this point I really feel it’s time to address the elephant in the room: what possessed them to name their brewery ‘War Dogs’?
“Ah, yes,” begins Diego, with the air of a man who is sick of explaining this to non-Italians. “So, the name does translate as War Dogs, but it’s more like a stray dog in war times, because otherwise it would be kind of dark. In our case, it comes from a very famous song from a very famous Italian singer.
“The story is that I was taking part in the Mongol Rally, which is a famous rally from London to Mongolia, in a tiny old Fiat Panda with three other guys. We’d been given a cassette tape with this song on it, which I absolutely fell in love with; the lyrics talk about four dogs, which was us! Canadigeurra is basically a nonsense word in Italian, with no meaning or associations, so it’s kind of graphic in a sense. So people hear this name and generally have the same reaction — like, what the hell is this? — but then they remember it.”
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