Ok, so I've had one of those stars aligning, being in the right place at the right time kind of events and thought I'd share.
I've had the chance to take a year off in Europe....so I did and doing so I thought I'm going to visit as many brewries and try as many new beers as I can. Well things have been a little dry for the first 10.5 months of the trip, the standard macro fair (Beer in Malta was the highlight if that says anything) and a few times I even had to resort to.....gasp....wine. I'm currently winding up the trip in Italy and Germany (high hopes for Gemany...Bamberg to be exact) but in Italy I found a little gem I wasn't expecting.
I'm in Emilia Romanga (Province (Does Italy have Provinces?) in the North to the east of Tuscany) staying outside a small town called Pavullo nel Frignano. I had a free night so a group of us headed into town in search of a beer bar called the Goblin Beer House which was rumoured to be the best Pub in Italy....which I thought was odd as the town is tiny and up in the mountains. Well we found it and it was open....just...so the place was empty. We sat down and the bar guy came to take our order, he just so happens to also be the owner. We got chatting and I found out he is a brewer as well.....and has contacts at Cantillon in Brussles.....and brewed a labic there with grapes he brought up from the area....which Cantillon bottled as Don Quijote (
http://www.ratebeer.com/beer/cantillon-don-quijote/101077/). Sweet Jeebus! Less to say we chatted over a few beers and all was right with the world. This is the only bar I've been to where you can order 15L bottles (Nebuchadnezzars).
I had no idea visiting a small pub in northern Italy would go from grape vines, to lambic brewries in Belgium and back again. Crazy.
B
