Italian Brew-Ha-Ha

How a son of a Piedmontese winemaker launched Italy’s craft beer scene

Teo Musso's stellar success was shaped by a fight with his father, a Piedmont winegrower who insisted his children drink the family's home vino with meals.

"He made me drink wine mixed with water," Musso says, adding that the stuff often approached vinegar.

A punk-rock rebel at 15, Musso defiantly told his dad, "'I want to drink beer!'"

Today at 50, the bearded, gray-mopped Musso has followed that proclamation to become a guru of Italy's booming craft beer scene and to build one of the world's hottest artisanal beer brands, Baladin.

Baladin beers are served in high-end European restaurants in Musso-designed tasting glasses. He owns 13 themed pubs across Italy, is a partner in breweries inside Eataly stores in New York and Rome, and has opened a hip, gastronomic beer-pairing restaurant called Casa Baladin on the main square of his native Piozzo (pop. 1,000), a Dolcetto-producing town 10 miles southwest of Barolo.

I recently spent a day in Piozzo and came away impressed by the creative whirlwind that is Musso, as well as by his beers.

Musso's top beers aren't thirst-quenching lagers or hoppy pale ales. They are deep, grainy, unpasteurized ales—from blonde to nearly black—with aromatic complexity akin to fine wines. Perhaps they could only come out of vino-loving Italy.

Baladin began in 1986 when Musso, a high-school dropout, decided to open a pub in Piozzo with his then-girlfriend. Musso indulged his two passions—music and beer—by producing live concerts and stocking 200 brews.

Then in the early 1990s, Musso decided to learn brewing in his mecca, Belgium. There he found two mentors to teach him the craft: one a creative "anarchist," the other a production engineer.

"It was not my goal to make beer, but to better understand what I was selling," says Musso. "But in the end, I fell in love with the idea of bringing a new vision to beer."

In Piozzo in 1996, Musso began brewing his own ales—malting and mashing barley prior to fermentation on a stovetop in a window of his pub. "It scared people," Musso recalls. "People said, 'What is he doing?' The phrase birra artiginale didn't exist at that time."

Customers disappeared, and Musso found himself financially in "merda" ("shit"). Musso then made a daring bet: to market his beer like wine across Italy.

He personally delivered to 500 restaurants samples of his amber and white ales in his now-signature wine-style bottles closed with corks and wax. He explained to sommeliers and chefs that "these were beers you could put on a table instead of wine."

"I wanted to make Italians understand that beer could be completely different," says Musso. "Industry completely destroyed the dignity of the product, and my idea was to bring it back."

His quest made him a media star and broadcast his idea of craft beer Italian-style. Today, Italy has more than 500 microbreweries.

Baladin grows most of its own grain in southern Italy to produce 30 labels of unpasteurized beer in a brewery outside Piozzo. Eataly founder Oscar Farinetti has taken a 20 percent personal stake in Baladin, which also brews for the Eataly-controlled Lurisia brand.

Of special interest to wine lovers are the traditional "barley wine" ales that have been Baladin's top offerings since 2010. A white called Lune and a darker version called Terre are aged 18 months in used wine barrels donated by top Italian wine estates, from Tuscany's Sassicaia to Sicily's Donnafugata. Musso also makes a heady oxidized ale called Xyauyù that he says was inspired by Madeira.

These beers—cellared in what was once the chicken coop of his parents' house—are not only made "in the spirit of wine," says Musso, but also represent a truce in the long beer-wine battle with his father.

Still, the meticulous and obsessional Musso has no intention of delving into wine. Baladin owns a couple acres of Dolcetto vines and sells the harvest to a cooperative.

"It would be dangerous for me," Musso laughs. "I know myself well, and if I plunged into wine, I would want to make another revolution."