A village beer bar in the Langhe.

Baladin began as a pub. In 1986 Teo Musso, who grew up in a farming family in Piozzo, a small village in the province of Cuneo in Piedmont, opened a beer bar there called Le Baladin. The company says it poured more than 200 beers, most of them Belgian. Italian Wikipedia says the name, an Old French word for a travelling entertainer or street performer, was suggested by François Rauline, and that at first the bar brewed nothing of its own.

That changed after Musso spent time in Belgium learning to brew, as La Stampa recounted in 2021 for the brewery’s twenty-fifth anniversary. In 1996 he turned the bar into a brewpub, using a small plant that the company says was designed in Belgium by Jean-Louis Dits of the Brasserie à Vapeur. The first draught beers were Blonde and Ambrée.

Bottles followed in 1997, the company says, with Super as the first bottled Baladin beer, alongside Isaac, a Belgian-style white beer named after Musso’s son, and Noël, a dark Christmas ale. In 2000 came Wayan, a saison named after his daughter, and Nora; the company also says the chicken coop at his parents’ home became a fermentation cellar, reached by a wort pipeline he built across the village. Italian Wikipedia records that the beer writer Michael Jackson included Isaac in his Great Beer Guide after a visit.

In 2002 the company set up Selezione Baladin to distribute its beers in Italy and abroad; the company that runs the website today still trades under that name.

Barley fields, oxidised ales and a glass.

Through the 2000s Baladin widened what a small Italian brewery could make. In 2004 it released Xyauyù, an oxidised barley wine, and Elixir, fermented with a whisky yeast, the company says. The same period produced the TeKu tasting glass, created by Musso with the beer writer Lorenzo “Kuaska” Dabove; the company dates it to 2006, Italian Wikipedia to 2004, and the specialist site Cronache di Birra has written about how it became a symbol of Italian craft beer.

The brewery also moved towards the field. In 2006 it began a controlled barley supply on four hectares at Piozzo, and in 2007 it planted its first barley at Melfi in Basilicata, the company says; Italian Wikipedia adds that it began growing hops in 2009. In 2011 it launched Nazionale, which the company describes as made with Italian barley, Italian hops and Italian yeast, and in 2012 it became an agricultural company.

Collaboration became a habit. The company lists Super Arrogant with Stone Brewing, Etrusca with Dogfish Head and the archaeologist Patrick McGovern, and YI-ER with Birrificio Italiano, and it opened a Birreria inside Eataly in New York. Beyond beer it makes soft drinks, including a cola developed with Slow Food in 2011, as well as cider and spirits.

Hospitality has carried the name as far as the bottles. Casa Baladin, a restaurant with rooms, opened in Piozzo in 2007, followed by Open Baladin venues in Cinzano, Rome, Turin and Cuneo, and abroad a riad at Essaouira in Morocco, a brewpub in Geneva and, Italian Wikipedia says, a pub in London’s Camden Market.

Craft beer in Italy.

The seven brands in this group are all Italian beer names: Baladin, Birra del Borgo, Forst, Birra Poretti, Lambrate, Birrificio Italiano and Toccalmatto. Two are nineteenth-century breweries. Forst was founded in 1857 at Forst, near Merano in South Tyrol, and has been in the hands of the Fuchs family since Josef Fuchs took it over in 1863, Italian Wikipedia says. Poretti brewed its first beer at Induno Olona, near Varese, in December 1877 under its founder Angelo Poretti; Carlsberg bought half of the business in 1982 and has owned it outright since 2002, according to Italian Wikipedia and VareseNews.

The other five belong to Italy’s craft-beer era. 1996 was a busy year: Teo Musso began brewing at Baladin in Piozzo, Piedmont, where he had opened the Le Baladin pub in 1986; Agostino Arioli and his brother Stefano opened Birrificio Italiano as a brewpub at Lurago Marinone, near Como, moving production to Limido Comasco in 2012, Il Sole 24 Ore reported; and Lambrate poured its first beer in the Milan district of the same name, founded by Giampaolo and Davide Sangiorgi with Fabio Brocca. Birra del Borgo followed in 2005 at Borgorose, Lazio, founded by Leonardo Di Vincenzo, and has been wholly owned by AB InBev since April 2016; in June 2026 it began a procedure towards ceasing activity, Beverfood reported. Toccalmatto was started by Bruno Carilli in Fidenza, near Parma, in 2008, and the Tribunale di Parma declared the judicial liquidation of its company in February 2025.

A beer’s identity is carried by a name, a label and the place it promises, while the company behind it may have changed hands or moved its brewing. Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — its founding story, its owners over time, where its beer is brewed and how its labels have changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

Artists on the can.

In July 2016 Baladin moved production to a new brewery in Piozzo, set in a park the company calls the Baladin Open Garden, on a 73,000-square-metre property with a farmhouse; Italian Wikipedia, citing Cronache di Birra, says the plant was opened to visitors. In 2024 Il Sole 24 Ore reported two production sites, Piozzo and Bernareggio in Lombardy.

The company launched POP in a can in November 2015 and refreshed its image with twelve new designs in 2019. It gave six classic beers new labels in the Flower Power series of 2020 and restyled its classic labels in January 2025. It also hands surfaces to named artists: the tattoo artist Sergio Messina of Rome’s Shock Tattoo Studio designed a limited Rock’n’Roll Tattoo can in 2019; the comic artist Mirka Andolfo illustrated Nazionale cans in 2020; and each year’s Advent calendar has had a different illustrator, from Marco Bailone in 2022 to Gabriella Piccatto, Antonio “Sualzo” Vincenti and, in 2025, Giuseppe Camuncoli. In December 2020 it adopted a full-opening 360-degree can end for Green Pea, part of what Italian Wikipedia describes as an eco-sustainable packaging line. For its thirtieth anniversary, in November 2025, the company says it introduced magenta as a new brand colour.

In March 2024 Baladin ran an equity crowdfunding campaign called Beer Revolution on the Mamacrowd platform; Il Sole 24 Ore reported that it reached its target in six days with about 2,300 investors, while the company counts 2,197 new shareholders. Musso, the newspaper said, remained founder and chief executive, and described the aim as opening the company’s capital to as many people as possible.

For a design guide, Baladin shows how a village brewery can make its labels a rotating gallery while keeping its founder’s story at the centre. Compare Birrificio Italiano, its partner on YI-ER, and Menabrea, another Piedmont beer. For this guide we use magenta, plum and barley gold with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Baladin’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.