2023 Author: Cody Thornton | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-05-24 11:20
“Come siori come and visit the new Baladin brewery“, they told us. The largest and most modern, the one that makes you experience the production of the craft beer most famous in Italy.
So we set the navigator to " Location Valle, 25, Piozzo (CN) “, Where the Langhe ends and the void begins, introduced by a valley floor, where for some time the vineyards have bordered the hops.
Once we arrive at our destination, we notice that the plants have yet to grow, and are added to a number of ongoing constructions and future visions linked to the abnormal project of the new Baladin brewery.
Fifteen million euros have already been invested and crowdfunding will soon open to make the surrounding green area a space that "everyone can feel their own", according to Teo (where we will go camping drunk, in practice).
Teo is Teo Musso, the man behind, the visionary founder, his presence makes everyone feel like Charlie in The Chocolate Factory, as if we had found a gold plate behind the cap of a Nora, one of his most famous beers.
We who were thinking of the classic company tour, with the attached imposition of masks and caps, find ourselves in front of a half-restored 14th century farmhouse. One of those works left halfway with a bit of ostentation because the exposed brick is the exposed brick, you want to put.
Add that there is still a lot to do.
Under the arcades, where Gabriele Bonci's pizza is now being baked for the feast of Baladin's thirty years, there will be stalls in the Market of the Earth style.
Next to the farmhouse there will be an oven and embers (the meaning is that one buys things and then cooks them there, and then shells them in the picnic areas) and obviously a pub, but at the moment we don't know where, presumably on the second floor., nor when, let's say in a couple of years.
We pass through the personnel offices and enter the newly built brewery via an overpass.
Immediately, the signs and walls painted halfway between company slogans and illustrated explanations of how beer is processed, bring us back to reality: we and the dozens of journalists present on the tour are not the lucky winners of a lottery organized by Willy Wonka. These spaces are open, and the nerds of the craft brewery and the gozzovigliatori in various capacities can come here.
Another clear message: control of the supply chain. The use of self-produced raw materials currently reaches 85%, with the goal of 100% by 2020.
Luck also helps, or maybe it will be happy astral combinations. With 400 hectares of barley to be malted and the record for the first cultivation of hops, the new brewery is located next to springs of pure water.
The plant for cooking beer is a blast: 5,000 liters of capacity for an annual production potential of 50,000 hectoliters. Before, to understand each other, it was 3,500 liters.
Everything is automated, for example, the spices used by Baladin such as Calabrian bergamot rind and Ethiopian myrrh soak themselves.
Next to the mammoth device, as if it were to scale, is the micro-system (300 liters) used by the master brewers of Gastronomic Sciences that makes Baladin a chic didactic branch of the University of Pollenzo.
And to underline the link with the Slow Food school, a video signed by the faculty produces the first emotional moment of the day: a fictionalized Teo Musso among the wheat fields sees himself as a child.
The answer to the question you are asking is yes: there is a large screen among the production plants in Baladin.
The cellar with attached barriques is the envy of neighboring Barolo producers. Here, for example, the beer with the most unpronounceable name in the world is aged in wood: Xyauyù, dark and with high fermentation.
But the real gem is the Kioke, a barrel in centenary cypress and bamboo which in the normal nature of things would be destined for the artisan production of soy sauce.
But no: it is here to host the fermentation of the Xyauyù Kioke, which, considering the 30 hectoliters capacity of the container, we will not see in the bars, as happens with the Isaac.
The circular structure of a novel as it should be, demands that this story also end with a beginning. After all, we can't expect anything else from someone who calls himself El Baladin (the storyteller).
Teo Musso takes everyone among the Cirque Bidon caravans - these days to the brewery for the 30th birthday party - then tells the story of the jugglers who arrived in Piozzo 34 years ago. Where, then, there was not only a lack of craft beer: there really wasn't a pipe of anything.
He, young and full of dreams, fell in love with that world.
And what did the suitcase do? Did you learn how to throw six balls into the air at the same time?
No. He found a way to tap into that world thanks to a beautiful name he found with the help of François Rauline (called "Bidon"), the founder of the circus.
The name is Baladin, and as he told it, even we were moved.