Beer distillates

It’s true, before us beer distillates in Italy did not exist, and for many it was hard to even imagine. But this, as always, has never stopped us. Since the beginning we’ve been experimenting with distilling a variety of different beers, blonde, dark, Weizen, Weissbier, double and triple malt, coming to the conclusion that each type gave birth to a different distillate. In the end we refined our “recipe” as such: a blonde beer, double malted, high fermentation and lightly hoppy, that’s been produced artisanally for us since 1995. The remainder of the story is told by our beer distillates in the glass itself.

The main difficulty has been that of having authorization to create a distillate that did not exist as a commercial category. In fact during those years the state labels, which are the bands wrapped around the neck of the bottle, were different for each kind of alcoholic (Grappa, Acquavite di Vino, Acquavite di Frutta, Liquors and many more). As such when we sent the application to the Verona UTF in regards to beer distillation we were denied specifically because it did not exist yet. But, with the insistence of Capovilla with its head engineer, we came to the realization that this new distillate could be considered a “cereal-based aquavit”, with the possibility of carrying the Whisky label. Having sent the application back to the Ministry of Agriculture in Rome it took almost two years to get the definitive authorization. In that time the European Community has since decided that the terms “Bierbrand” and “Eau de vie de Biére” were the only ones permittable for beer distillates, being of German and French origin respectively (thus not considered typical of Italy). Thus, our Bierbrand was born.