Roma: Great Food, Fantastic Wine and... Terrific Beer?

Our expectations of Rome were those of most people before they go: old buildings, great food, bold wines, long lines, crowded piazzas, and trains full of thieves. What I wasn’t expecting was to be able to find craft beers from all over the world served in the tiniest little beer cave surrounded by Italians watching football pretty much all day long.

Ma Che Siete Venuti a Fa was rated best beer bar in the world in 2010 on ratebeer.com. A quick peek at the top rated beers on ratebeer.com and it is easy to see why this bar topped the list: only one beer came in at 5%, the rest were hovering around 10% with a barley wine topping 15%. There were 10 or so taps with mostly beers from overseas and 3 casks, all serving near-as-made-no-difference ethanol. They also had a decent selection of vintage lambics that looked very tempting, but at 30 Euros a pop a bit too pricey. The bar itself was very cozy and not exactly sparkling, but fit the area of Trastevere quite well. I visited twice and both times the bar was packed with lubricated Italians watching football and crowding the doorway. All stereotypical fans present, complete with the guy in the corner yelling drunken obscenities at the TV. It was an interesting bar to sit and have a few drinks in. While it is obviously very well known around the world, it has somehow managed to remain Italian. So Italian in fact that tourists generally seemed uncomfortable and rarely stuck around for a drink.

My first drink was a DIPA. In grand Double IPA fashion it was nothing less than an assault on my taste buds, especially considering I’ve been drinking English cask bitters almost exclusively for the past year and a bit. The hop bitterness was so overwhelming in fact that I couldn’t taste anything else in the beer besides danky hops. The only way I could describe it is mossy forest. My second beer was even more extreme, a barley wine from Holland weighing in at 15% abv and served in a cask. The alcohol was smooth but hot, tasting closer to a whiskey than a barley wine. I think the malt character was similar to an English brown, but it was hard to tell as the alcohol managed to mask a lot of the taste. Finally, Julianne had a weissebier from somewhere in the northern latitudes which was a fantastic example of the style: oranges and citrus that went down very easily. For the weather and time of year, an admittedly much better choice than mine.

Open Baladin was another Italian craft beer venue worth visiting. This bar differed significantly from Ma Che Siete Venuti a Fa in that it was spacious, clean, and funky. The funkiness spread to the beers, where they seemed to focus on dogfishhead style brews, laced with coriandor and other herbs and spices. There was no reinheitsgebot here. With nearly 40 taps and 100 bottles it felt like an off-centered Brouwer’s with an Italian focus.

My first beer was an American style IPA. Very hop forward with not much else making an appearance. A decent pint but impossible to drink more than one as the hop character was so overpowering. The second beer was of different sorts, a beer brewed with spelt. I have made several loaves of bread with spelt but have never had a beer brewed from it. After only a single example I don’t feel as though I can come to any conclusions about the style as a whole. This particular beer though had a very wholesome bread taste and feel with very little hops, showcasing the unique malt flavor from the locally grown spelt.

From my limited experience in Rome, the Italian craft beer scene seems to be following an American style: brewing primarily big, non-session, or otherwise limit-pushing beers. Regardless it was an extremely pleasant surprise being able to watch a few games and drink some great beer.