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A few days ago Beverfood published the news Menabrea which has officially launched two new beers, expressly designed to hit top restaurants. They actually belong to a brand new Top Restaurant line, named 3,5° (a light golden lager) and 7,5° (a red bock) after their ABV. The company of Biella is striding to match their brand to refined cuisine, in the wake of other industrial brewers that already tried to walk the same path in the past. I must recall that Menabrea is industrial to all intents, although often mistakenly considered a craft brewer from beer newbies.

As we expect it’s all about communication and appearance. Here you are the cool bottle, a decidedly vintage design and a series of sophisticated details. The glass is rather disturbing but probably functional for marketing. The concern rises while reading the descriptions: the 3,5° is brewed on “an ancient rice based recipe” while the 7,5° is “produced in the traditional Menabrea style with corn, malt, hops and water. ” Rice and corn, in spite of who expected at least the use of quality ingredients.

I mentioned above other industrial beers brewed expressly for haute cuisine. A year ago I reported the release of Estrella Damm Inedit linked to one of the biggest names of international cuisine: Ferran Adria. A few months before Moretti celebrated its 150th anniversary with the release of Grand Cru, which uses Massimo Bottura as testimonial to directly get in the high Italian cuisine. It didn’t take many too long to suss out that Moretti Grand Cru was nothing but a re-labeled Affligem, but that’s another story, however interesting to understand the worth of such operations.

In Italy, the restaurant offered fertile ground for the craft beer boom: Teo Musso, a pioneer in Italy, does not hide that his Baladin were precisely designed to complement wine bottles on the shelves of restaurants. Unlike other nations, craft brewers bet on that sector, being, for many microbreweries, even the primary destination of their products. If today Italian craft beer is perceived as a luxury good, being more present in wine bars than in pubs, is also for this reason.

If the major corporations will begin to systematically hit the sector, what consequences will result for Italian craft beer? Certainly, many small producers will have to rethink the positioning of their products, but we’re sure that’s a bad thing? Perhaps this should spread more decisively a different conception of craft beer: a popular drink, easy and available, with its own identity and not committed to mimic the wine world. A product that recovers its original features… I do not think lovers will mind too much.