A railway contractor comes home to brew.

Birra Poretti is named after its founder, Angelo Poretti, a man from Vedano Olona, near Varese in Lombardy. Italian Wikipedia, citing La Repubblica, says he spent many years in Austria, Germany and Bohemia, starting as a labourer on the imperial railways and growing rich as a contractor for railway lines. The company says that on his travels he met master brewers and learned how to make beer.

He came home with his wife, Franziska Peterzilka, and a brewmaster, Emanuel Anger. In 1876, Italian Wikipedia says, citing the beer magazine Fermento Birra, he bought a disused industrial site at Induno Olona, a former starch works, and turned it into a brewery with machinery brought from abroad; the water came from a nearby spring he also bought. The company describes the location as the Valganna, the valley north of Varese, chosen for its springs. The first beer, a pale lager in the Pilsner style, was brewed on 26 December 1877, according to La Repubblica as cited by Italian Wikipedia, and regular production began in February 1878. The company says the beer was invited to the National Exhibition in Milan in 1881.

After 1901 the brewery passed to four of Poretti’s nephews — Angelo and Tranquillo Magnani, Edoardo Chiesa and Francesco Bianchi — who had the site rebuilt between 1905 and 1912 by the German architects Bihl & Woltz in the Jugendstil, the German form of Art Nouveau, Italian Wikipedia says; the company became a joint-stock company in 1922, and further work was done by the architect’s sons, Alfred and Richard Bihl. The Depression and a failed venture in Libya left the brewery close to closing, Italian Wikipedia says.

Bassetti, Splügen and a prize-winning tap.

In 1939 the Bassetti family, which already owned the Spluga brewery at Chiavenna, near the Splügen Pass, bought the business, Italian and English Wikipedia say. Under Giannino Bassetti and then his son Aldo, Spluga’s production was moved to Induno Olona from 1950, and the head office moved to Milan. Italian Wikipedia says the company launched Splügen Bock in 1969, with an advertisement directed by the film-maker Ermanno Olmi.

The brewery’s place in design history comes from a beer tap. In 1964 the Spinamatic beer dispenser, designed by Achille and Pier Giacomo Castiglioni and produced by Poretti, won the Compasso d’Oro, Italy’s industrial-design award; it is held in the Compasso d’Oro collection of the ADI Design Museum in Milan. The jury, as the museum summarises it, praised its small footprint, how easily it could be cleaned and taken apart, its handling of the technical demands of serving beer and its link to advertising, and saw it as a piece of “communication design” for a new kind of shared drinking.

The company grew and then struggled again. It bought the Henmed brewery at Ceccano, south of Rome, in 1973, Italian Wikipedia says, just as the oil crisis hit. In 1975 it signed an agreement with the Danish group United Breweries, soon to become Carlsberg, to produce and sell the Tuborg and Carlsberg brands in Italy.

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.

A brewery Carlsberg kept, and a range named by its hops.

Carlsberg took control in stages. Italian Wikipedia, citing the Lombardy region’s historical archives, says the group bought 50% from the Bassetti family in 1982 and a further 25% in 1998, after which the company was renamed Carlsberg Italia; in 2002 it bought the rest. Carlsberg has owned the brewery outright since 2002. In 2020 VareseNews reported that Carlsberg Italia had its head office at Lainate, near Milan, and had kept the historic Poretti brewery at Induno Olona working.

The modern brand was built on that history. In 2007, the trade magazine Beverfood reported in 2009, Carlsberg Italia revived the old brewery’s image with an umbrella brand, “Birrificio di Angelo Poretti,” for its Italian beers. Splügen was then brought under the same name, with a new identity by the Milan agency Ambito5, which had earlier designed the Birrificio Angelo Poretti identity: hops became the central image, the words “ai tre luppoli” — “with three hops” — went on the label and neck, the lion logo was kept but lightened, and the bottle changed from green to brown glass.

The hop count became the range’s system. The beers are named by the number of hop varieties, the company’s pages say: 3 Luppoli, the former Splügen; 4 Luppoli Originale, a lager; 5 Luppoli and 6 Luppoli bocks; seasonal unfiltered 7 Luppoli beers; and further numbers up to 10 Luppoli, a sparkling beer sold in 75cl bottles. In 2015 Poretti was the official beer of the Italy Pavilion at Expo Milano, the company says.

For a design guide, Birra Poretti shows how a numbering system and an old building can carry a brand owned by a multinational. Compare Tuborg, the Danish brand Poretti agreed in 1975 to produce and sell in Italy, and Forst, a northern Italian brewery that stayed with its founding family. For this guide we use a hop green, a kettle copper and a lager gold with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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