A biochemistry student turned brewer.

Birra del Borgo was founded in 2005 by Leonardo Di Vincenzo at Borgorose, a small town in the province of Rieti on the border between Lazio and Abruzzo. Its 2016 press release tells the founder’s story: he began brewing at home for fun while studying biochemistry at university, travelled around Europe to explore traditional beer styles, learned from German and Belgian brewers, and brewed for Starbess in Rome, the experience that led him to the idea of his own brewery. Its first inspiration, the release says, came from English and Belgian beers, reworked to fit Italian food culture.

The company’s own history places the brewery in the upper Salto valley, the gateway to the Monti della Duchessa nature reserve, and names its early beers as ReAle, DucAle and Duchessa. The company says Duchessa is made with spelt grown on the Monti della Duchessa, that Maledetta uses native yeasts from the mountains around the brewery, and that a seasonal beer is named after the gentian that flowers there in spring. It also says that, through agreements with local growers, 80 per cent of its malts come from the region or neighbouring Abruzzo.

The first BdBday, the brewery’s birthday party, was held in June 2007, the company says, and in June 2013 the food site Scatti di Gusto reported that year’s edition at Borgorose, with the old Colle Rosso brewery hosting seminars.

Beer as a partner to food.

Birra del Borgo built its name on pairing beer with Italian food and on unusual ingredients. The company describes a “via italiana” from 2009, with L’Equilibrista as the beer that carried the idea of beer at the table into the territory of wine. In 2009, the company says, it opened a new brewery at Spedino, near Borgorose, which became the heart of the business, together with a chemistry laboratory for quality control.

By 2016 the range ran to ten year-round beers, four seasonal beers based on local ingredients and an experimental family called “Bizzarre,” according to the press release issued that April, which said the brewery’s inspiration was set by the moment and by the season of each beer’s main ingredient, driven by a wish to reinvent styles and push past their limits. The release ended with a pun on the house beer, saying the team would keep going “to Re (Thinking) Ale.”

The brewery’s current website carries the line “Be Your Beer, Drink Your Style” and the description “innovators of beer since 2005,” and still sorts its range into classic, seasonal and Bizzarre beers.

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.

From partnership to closure procedure.

AB InBev has owned Birra del Borgo since 2016. On 22 April 2016 the brewery announced what it called a partnership with Anheuser-Busch InBev, under which it became a wholly owned subsidiary of the group; the terms were not disclosed. Di Vincenzo stayed on as chief executive. In the release he said the beer sector had become very competitive and that the group offered access to technological improvements, scientific research and commercial growth; he added that the beers would continue to be made at Borgorose, with continued local investment. Simon Wuestenberg, AB InBev’s country director for Italy, said the group was impressed by what Di Vincenzo and his team had built since 2005. At the time AB InBev Italia’s portfolio included Beck’s, Corona, Leffe and Stella Artois, the release noted. All About Beer reported the deal the same day, and Scatti di Gusto wrote that it marked the end of craft brewing’s “garage” era in Italy.

The years under the group were turbulent. In February 2022 Dissapore reported strikes at the brewery’s osteria in Rome’s Prati district as the company planned to close its Rome venues to concentrate on the brewery, with about 42 of some 70 staff facing dismissal. Beverfood later reported that the experimental plant at Collerosso closed that year and was sold in February 2022.

On 5 June 2026 Birra del Borgo S.r.l. announced the start of the union procedure that precedes a future cessation of activity, citing structural and continuing economic difficulties, Beverfood reported; the notice concerned 21 permanent employees. In September 2026 Dissapore reported that staff had been called by email to what they understood to be a routine budget meeting before the announcement, that workers had held a strike and a sit-in outside AB InBev’s Italian offices in Milan, that the Flai Cgil Roma e Lazio union had criticised the group, and that a meeting with institutions was scheduled for mid-September. According to the workers, the group had turned down approaches from a Sardinian brewery and a group of local entrepreneurs, as well as a proposal for a workers’ cooperative; those are the workers’ claims, as reported.

For a design guide, Birra del Borgo shows how a brewery can turn its place — a town, a nature reserve, a mountain spelt — into beer names that read as a brand. Compare Goose Island, another craft brewery bought by AB InBev, and Baladin, from the same generation of Italian craft brewing. For this guide we use beech green, spelt gold and black with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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