Il Luppolo da Birra — How Italy Rediscovered Its Hop-Growing Past (and Bet on Its Future)

During my childhood, in the countryside where I was born and grew up, it was very common to see people walking along small rivers, or sometimes irrigation canals, or even along dusty and lonely country roads, looking for bruscandoli in springtime. 

Bruscandoli is the name given to the young shoots of wild hops by the people in Veneto. For ages, nobody in the northeastern part of Italy ever thought of them as an ingredient to be used in brewing, but rather as an element of gastronomy, revered for their excellent, lightly bitter taste. My mother, for example, used to make a risotto with bruscandoli that was creamy and delicate and, above all, a reminder that spring was at its apex and summer—and thus school holidays—was on its way. Another frequent preparation was a bruscandoli frittata: scrambled eggs and hop shoots, more or less. That dish is even more aromatic and tasty than the risotto, if less refined.

Later on, I discovered that those young hop shoots were picked almost everywhere in Italy. In other regions they had different names: asparagina or luartis in Lombardy, luperi in Umbria, and urtizon in Friuli Venezia Giulia. But their culinary use was the same.

Nowadays, fewer people go out in the country searching for bruscandoli, maybe because you can buy them at a greengrocer’s. And while they were once a free food, used by necessity in a post-war economy, they have since been discovered by Italian haute cuisine. Giancarlo Perbellini, a Michelin-starred chef in Verona, is famous for his own risotto with bruscandoli. Perhaps it is even better than my mother’s.

Despite the culinary role that bruscandoli plays, however, Italy has never really been considered an important place for hops. The beer industry does use local barley, malted in two maltings located in the south of the country, but hops are traditionally imported from Germany, Slovenia, and elsewhere. 

But that wasn’t always the case. Today, a new generation of agricultural researchers, academics, and brewers is rediscovering the country’s hop-growing history—and paving the way for an innovative new industry.

HOPS IN THE GRAVE

In 1994, in a village named Pombia, close to Novara in the region of Piedmont, archeologists discovered a necropolis dating to the sixth century B.C., roughly three centuries before the conquest of the region by Roman troops from the south. In one of the graves a small drinking vessel was found. A subsequent analysis showed that the bottom of the vessel contained traces of cereals—mainly barley—and herbs. Among the herbs, scientists found hop pollen residues.

Of course, it’s a leap too far to say that the ancient Celtic population living in the area before the arrival of the Roman legions was happily guzzling the era’s equivalent of Double IPAs—but the presence of hops proved that those people were at least aromatizing their fermented barley drink with what they found in their surroundings. And hops were certainly there, as confirmed by Pliny the Elder, who mentioned them among the edible plants of that part of Italy in his “Naturalis Historia” (“Natural History”), published in the first century A.D.

If wild hops were used, knowingly or unknowingly, by the Celts, they were also likely used later by the Benedictine monks of Montecassino Abbey in the southern Lazio region, who could have been brewing their own Ales as early as the sixth century. That said, we have to travel forward to the 19th century to discover a true Italian hop farmer.

“When I started to appreciate good beer, I also started to get involved in the subject as a student. So when a teacher at the university explained that no hops were cultivated in Italy at the time, I wanted to understand why and if there was any chance to do it.”

A businessman living in the Romagna countryside near Forlì, Gaetano Pasqui was well known at the time as an inventor of agricultural tools, a pioneer in improving cultivation, and a passionate scholar of beet and peanut farming. In the 2012 book “L’uomo della birra” (“The Beer Man”), his descendant Umberto Pasqui described how Gaetano decided to open his brewery, Premiata Fabbrica di Birra Gaetano Pasqui, in 1835. In that era, breweries were spreading throughout Italy: Within just a few decades, many of today’s legacy brands including Birra Wuhrer, Birra Menabrea, Birra Peroni, Birra Moretti, Birra Forst, and Birra Dreher were all founded. By 1894 a government census counted 151 working breweries in Italy. Like other visionaries at the time, Gaetano Pasqui realized that things were “sulla cresta dell’onda,” or “on the crest of the wave.” What distinguished him from his contemporaries was that he considered imported German hops too expensive, and instead started growing his own.

Pasqui began by collecting whatever wild hops he was able to find and selecting choice examples by their characteristics. By 1847 he was able to brew a beer with his own “home-grown” hops, and his brewery continued using local hops until the day he died in 1879. Unfortunately, the “Birra Pasqui” adventure ended with him, but his experience was imitated by other farmers in the area, with several small hop farms growing on the hills surrounding Rimini and Cesena, in the part of the Emilia-Romagna region that faces the Adriatic Sea and the golden beaches of the Riviera Romagnola, which is usually packed with tourists in summertime.

In the end, Italy’s 19th-century movement towards commercial hop cultivation was stopped by a lack of confidence among the big brewers of the era. In this sense we can read what the scholar Eugenio Mazzei wrote in his essay “La coltivazione del luppolo nel cesenate,” or “The Cultivation of Hops in Cesena Territory,” published in 1909: “To us, the generic assertion of some agronomic writers that beer hops do not develop in Italy seems incorrect.” The essay mentions Gaetano Pasqui as proof that hops for the brewing industry could be cultivated with success in the country.

Unfortunately, Italy had to wait another century before hop farms would appear again. In 1989, the Ministry of Agricultural Food and Forestry Policies published an essay titled “Il luppolo da birra in Italia,” or “Beer Hops in Italy.” The report testifies to the existence of some small experimental fields near Feltre—in the same Veneto region where I grew up, close to the Birreria di Pedavena—and in Alto Adige, the northern Italian territory that shares a border with Austria. While the report and these first attempts at cultivation went almost completely unnoticed, the conclusion of that five-year project notes that there were “good agronomic possibilities for growing beer hops in an Italian environment.”

Instead, the definitive push towards Italian hop-growing found its roots in the craft beer revolution that started in the middle of the 1990s. In the beginning, pioneers like Teo Musso at Birra Baladin had to buy their ingredients from abroad, but with the fast growth and success of craft breweries, some brewers began to move towards local ingredients. 

While using Italian produce like grapes, other fruits, and flowers has become a kind of trademark of modern Italian beer culture, other such forays also extended to beer’s core ingredients. For several years Musso has had his own barley fields in the south of Italy, and Leonardo Di Vincenzo of Birra del Borgo was searching for native yeast strains before his brewery was acquired by AB InBev in 2016. But for many brewers, securing a reliable, Italian-grown hop was the final challenge.

DAWN OF THE HOPS

Within a few years, small hop gardens were starting to spread across Italy. Naturally, most contained foreign varieties, such as Cascade, East Kent Golding, Saaz, or Hallertauer Mittelfrüh, and were cultivated without the proper tools to grow and harvest the aromatic cones, but it was a start. At least they demonstrated that growing hops for brewing was not a completely useless endeavor, as everyone used to believe. In 2016, the Ministry of Agriculture financed the first national research project concerning the cultivation of hops in Italy, entrusted to the Council for Agricultural Research and Agricultural Economics Analysis (CREA). By the end of 2017, Italy could count 64 hopfields, even if many of them were little bigger than one acre.

In this general atmosphere of rediscovery in 2017, it is worth telling a story that stands out from the others. Ten years earlier, a student in the agrarian department at the University of Parma had the chance to attend a 2007 lecture by Giovanni Campari, founder and head brewer at Birrificio del Ducato. While sampling Birrificio del Ducato’s Viaemilia, AFO, and New Morning—three of the very first beers brewed by Campari—Eugenio Pellicciari fell in love.

“At the beginning, we met some perplexity among Italian brewers about our hops. All of them were used to buying hops from abroad and, I have to say, we were not ready to provide the product continuously. But we kept believing in our idea and we continued to invest. More plants, more technology, including a hop-picking machine, a dryer, a cutting machine, and more product.”

“When I started to appreciate good beer, I also started to get involved in the subject as a student,” Pellicciari says. “So when a teacher at the university explained that no hops were cultivated in Italy at the time, I wanted to understand why and if there was any chance to do it.”

As part of his research, Pellicciari learned about Gaetano Pasqui. Later he discovered the story of a hop farm in the comune of Marano sul Panaro, near Modena, that had been owned by the Marquis of Montecuccoli in the year 1874. 

“Marano is a small village,” Pellicciari says. “It is part of the better-known Vignola area, which is famous for cherries, balsamic vinegar, and [the small town of] Castelvetro, one of the three cornerstones of Lambrusco wine [production]. But also it was the perfect location for the experiment that my friends and I wanted to try.”

With the support of Parma University and the municipality of Marano, Pellicciari and his partners planted an experimental hopfield in 2011. At the same time, wild hops were collected: not just from the area around Marano, but also from other parts of northern Italy, from Liguria in the northwest to Veneto in the northeast, as well as from Tuscany, and even Calabria, far down in the south. In the end, Pellicciari’s experimental field contained about 80 varieties of “autochthonous” hops—ostensibly indigenous varieties that had already proved their ability to grow in Italy.

“Of course many of these varieties had no relevant qualities for brewing,” Pellicciari says, “but a few seemed to have some potential. So in 2014, we founded Italian Hops Company with a twofold purpose: to grow international hops in the Marano terroir and to breed the first autochthonous Italian hops for brewing beer.”

If the first goal was easy to achieve, the second one took a very long time. The rare genotypes with potential for brewing had to pass through many stages, beginning with analysis of the plant’s vigor, its disease resistance, its production capacity in terms of quantity and quality, and every kind of organoleptic analysis—that is, how they smelled and tasted.

A year later in 2015, Italian Hops Company was able to invite about 20 breweries to join an initial project called Harvest, for which the breweries created a one-off beer using wet hops from Marano. By 2019, that project had grown to include 55 breweries. 

“At the beginning, we met some perplexity among Italian brewers about our hops,” Pellicciari says. “All of them were used to buying hops from abroad and, I have to say, we were not ready to provide the product continuously. But we kept believing in our idea and we continued to invest. More plants, more technology, including a hop-picking machine, a dryer, a cutting machine, and more product. We now have 12.5 hectares [30 acres] which are cultivated ‘German style’ [with long rows, tall-ish trellises, and wide spacing] but with slightly lower trellises to suit our setting and climate.” 

Those trellises include a number of international varieties, Pellicciari says, from Cascade to Centennial, from East Kent Golding to Nugget. A high point came in 2018, when the U.K.’s Moor Beer Company brewed Italia’Hop, a Pale Ale made with Marano-grown Nugget.

If Italian Hops Company is beginning to gain some commercial success, it is not just among small breweries: Its Cascade was recently chosen for a beer by Birrificio Angelo Poretti, a large brewery owned by Carlsberg Italia. That said, the most relevant part of its mission is finding autochthonous Italian varieties, which distinguishes it from other hop startups in Italy, as well as from the brewery-owned “hopfengarten” (or small hop gardens that they use for their own consumption) that brands like Baladin have launched over the last few years.

“Æmilia, Futura and Mòdna are the names of our very first, 100% Italian hops, the product of our research, our work, our failed attempts,” Pellicciari says. “These are the real first bricks of the path towards hops that are truly ‘made in Italy.’”

CALL FOR BREWERS

Those first bricks were set in the ground by several brewers who were looking for an excuse to experiment. 

“I was among the bunch of breweries that participated in the first edition of Harvest, but my biggest interest was for the autochthonous varieties, of course,” says Agostino Arioli, founder of Birrificio Italiano. “I used Æmilia and Futura only in dry-hopping four years ago, but last year I decided to brew a beer just with them.” 

Called Hop, Tony Hop!, that Pale Lager was made by splitting the batch in two after the whirlpool. One part was double dry-hopped with Æmilia, while Futura went into the other.

“These hops were very green and quite raw, but they had delicate fruity notes that I like. You can find the wild touch in their aroma and flavor profile,” Arioli says. “I have to say they are not easy to use and the beer could taste unfamiliar to most beer drinkers, but they do have potential, even if they need to be tamed.”

For Arioli, these new hops are interesting for reasons beyond nationality. 

“It’s not about being able to say ‘Made in Italy,’ even if this trademark can create some marketing interest,” he says. “It’s about the search for a new taste, a new aroma—for the discovery of what a specific place, through hops, can express in a glass of beer.”

Other breweries are following different paths. Teo Musso, for example, grows his own hops near Piozzo, in the Langhe area where Baladin is located. And Fabiano Toffoli, founder and head brewer of 32 Via dei Birrai, a microbrewery located near Treviso in Veneto, decided to approach hop sourcing from a different angle.

“I have always chosen my hops in Poperinge [in Belgium], but in 2014 I had the idea to promote hops cultivation on the hills where I live and work,” he says. “Our project was to persuade local farmers to start to cultivate hops to supply the microbreweries in the area.” 

Toffoli has had some success: One local farmer has converted part of his production from breeding cows to growing hops and is now one of 32 Via dei Birrai’s suppliers. But Toffoli warns that it’s not as easy as it might seem. 

“First of all we had to invest money in technology, the machines we needed to transform fresh hops into useful hops for beer, then we have to build a strong relationship among farmers and brewers,” Toffoli says. “Farmers have to grow the hops that brewers request but, at the same time, brewers can’t change the hops requested every year. We live in a time where many brewers are always searching for a new beer to brew and a new beer often means different hops. But nature doesn’t run at the same speed of the market, or at the same speed of a brewer’s will. So we have farmers that start to grow a variety that they aren’t sure they’ll be able to sell when the time comes. The situation is a little chaotic.”

“I have always chosen my hops in Poperinge [in Belgium], but in 2014 I had the idea to promote hops cultivation on the hills where I live and work. Our project was to persuade local farmers to start to cultivate hops to supply the microbreweries in the area.”

Although Toffoli believes that his region and its climate offer great opportunities for hop cultivation, he acknowledges that there are some misconceptions about farming hops. Some promoters, he says, have been selling hop seedlings with the promise that in three years, farmers will be able to sell hops from them for €40 per kilogram, or about $21 per pound, when the real price is generally much lower. And in any case, success certainly doesn’t happen overnight.

“There’s a weird idea that growing hops means immediate cash return,” he says.

Nevertheless, it’s clear that Italy has good potential for hop cultivation—and that doing so could be a viable path forward for many, considering the financial difficulties that farmers are encountering with more traditional crops. But building up a new hop industry is not something that can be improvised. Successfully growing corn or tomatoes does not mean that you’ll have an easy time growing hops. Time will pronounce its sentence, but at the moment, hop fever is conquering Italy.

With that in mind, the 2018 launch of a particularly innovative hop company, one founded by a young engineer, should come as no surprise. Called Idroluppolo, Alessio Saccoccio’s startup applies hydroponic cultivation to hops—more or less.

“It would be more correct to call it ‘soilless,’” Saccoccio says, “but the process uses a scientific and targeted nutrition based on aqueous propolis [a resinous and nutritional substance that bees collect from the buds and bark of plants diluted in water], and offers several advantages. Firstly, because of constant monitoring, we can always be aware of the health and growth of the plant. But also, thanks to this process, we can obtain up to four harvests a year, saving 50% of our water consumption, and we can have four plants per square meter instead of the single plant in traditional hop growing.”

At the moment, Idroluppolo is working with two hop fields: one in Puglia, the southeasternmost part of the Italian peninsula, and the other one in Umbria, the central region known as “il cuore verde d’Italia” or “the green heart of Italy,” due to its forests and its status as one of the very few Italian regions that does not touch the sea. There’s also a new project for greenhouse cultivation in the north of the country, in Lombardy, close to the city of Bergamo. It’s another way to make Italian hops a reality, and a testimony to how much interest there is in the country today for hops as part of brewing beer, and not just an element of gastronomy. 

That interest is slightly “chaotic,” to use Toffoli’s word, young and sometimes imperfect, but it could be the very future of hops in Italy—a future that does not end in a bowl of risotto, but rather in a glass of beer. Obviously, with all due respect to my mother.

Words by Maurizio Maestrelli
Illustrations by Colette Holston