Vignette #8, Agostino Arioli (Birrificio Italiano)

Arioli (center) when he visited Portland in 2015. Photo by Giulio Marini.

Brewer vignettes feature quotes from brewers I picked up in my travels around the world.

““This is okay for, we call it ‘meditation beers’—special brews, specialty beers. These beers are beers you drink with your senses more than with your brain; birra da meditazione . When you drink a meditation beer, you really think about it. This taste reminds me of flowers; this taste reminds me of the food my aunt used to prepare me. So you’re really thinking about the beer.”

“In Italy we grow up where you can spend hours and hours on Saturday and Sunday discussing sauce—the spaghetti sauce or anything we are eating for lunch. The whole family and the relatives and parents and so on and we can discuss food for a long time. This is better; last time was worse. It’s overcooked, or it’s too rare. Really, we talk about food a lot; we really care about food. So this probably automatically require us to brew beers that can fit with our sense of what is pleasant, what is balanced.””