A family of pharmacists and a mountain name.

Braulio is an amaro alpino, an alpine herbal liqueur, from Bormio, the mountain town at the head of Valtellina in northern Lombardy, on the edge of the Stelvio National Park. Its story begins in a pharmacy. The company says the Bormio pharmacy was founded in the first half of the 19th century and owned by Dr Giuseppe Peloni, who had studied chemistry and pharmacy at the University of Padua and spent his life studying the plants and aromatic herbs of the surrounding slopes.

According to the company, Giuseppe passed that knowledge to his son Francesco Peloni, who experimented with herbal infusions and created Amaro Braulio in 1875. English and Italian Wikipedia give an earlier date for the recipe itself, 1826, credit it to Francesco Peloni, whom they describe as a pharmacist and botanist, and date production from 1875; the brand itself uses 1875 throughout, from its “original recipe since 1875” line to its history page.

The name is a local one. Monte Braulio is the peak “from which it takes its name,” Campari Group said in a 2019 statement carried by the trade site Beverfood; in March 2019 the news agency askanews, in a report published by Il Foglio, quoted the family’s Edoardo Tarantola Peloni as saying the ingredients were gathered on Monte Braulio, in the Stelvio park. The same report said production began in the family pharmacy, in a few small barrels kept beneath it, where the amaro was also sold.

The company tells the rest as a chain of handovers. Francesco, it says, revealed the recipe only to his son Attilio, who took Braulio to fairs in Italy and abroad; Attilio passed it to his nephew Egidio Tarantola Peloni; and Egidio’s son Edoardo now serves as Braulio’s master distiller, responsible, the company says, for all of its production processes.

Herbs, oak and an underground cellar.

The recipe is secret, and the brand makes a feature of the fact. On its product page the company says there is much guessing about the type and number of herbs — “some say 11, some say 13, others 15” — and that only four are known for sure: wormwood, yarrow, juniper and gentian. Italian Wikipedia, citing the brand’s site, names the yarrow as musk yarrow, achillea moscata.

The company describes a slow process. The herbs, roots and berries are cleaned, dried and milled, it says, then left to infuse in a solution of water and alcohol for 30 days; the liquid is filtered and diluted to 21 per cent alcohol, and then aged for up to two years in Slavonian oak barrels in a network of cellars directly beneath Bormio’s old town. The barrels, it says, come from the cooper Garbellotto, made from a blend of sessile and pedunculate oak. The 2019 askanews report described the cellars as having grown over time into a small underground city.

Those cellars have become part of the brand. The website now has a section called “Casa Braulio,” and in July 2023 Campari Group announced that Amaro Braulio was opening its restyled cellars in the heart of Bormio. A second section, “Braulio per Bormio,” ties the brand to the town.

There are two main versions. Alongside Braulio itself the company sells Braulio Riserva; Italian Wikipedia says the Riserva is aged for three years, is made in very limited quantities and has a stronger flavour, citing the food site Italia a Tavola, which presented it as a novelty for Christmas 2010. Italian Wikipedia also records a Valtellina mixed drink, the fraelino, made of equal parts grappa and Braulio.

The brand’s language is about time. Italian Wikipedia gives its slogan as “Essenza del tempo,” the essence of time; the English website heads its history page “It takes time to make history” and its production page “The longer it takes, the longer it lasts,” and its philosophy page invites the reader to slow down. The company describes the drink itself as amber brown with reddish hints.

Italy’s grappa, amari and liqueurs.

The seven brands in this group are all Italian spirits and liqueur names: Nonino, Nardini, Luxardo, Pallini, Braulio, Amaro Lucano and Meletti. Spirits and liqueur houses in general sit at many different points in the trade, from family firms that still carry a founder’s name to labels that now belong to much larger drinks groups, and a single bottle can be sold everywhere from a village bar to a cocktail list abroad.

A spirits or liqueur brand’s identity is usually carried less by what is in the bottle than by a label, a name and the place it promises, because the company behind the name may have changed hands, moved its production or grown far beyond the town where it started. That makes the questions behind each name worth asking plainly: who started it, who owns it now, and where its spirits or liqueurs are actually made and bottled.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — its founding story, its owners over time, where its spirits or liqueurs are made and how its labels have changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A Bormio recipe inside an international group.

Braulio has changed hands while staying in Bormio. English and Italian Wikipedia say that since 1999 the amaro has belonged to Casoni Liquori, a liqueur company based in Finale Emilia, in the province of Modena, while production continued at the Peloni family’s plant in Bormio. Casoni in turn came under Sicilian control: Italian Wikipedia’s history of the Averna group says Fratelli Averna began working with Casoni in 2005, bought a majority the following year and by 2009 held 98.5 per cent.

The last step came in April 2014, when Campari Group bought the whole of Fratelli Averna, La Stampa reported on 15 April 2014; Wikipedia names Fratelli Averna as the holder of the Braulio trademark. The askanews report of March 2019 described Braulio as part of the Campari Group since 2014, with Edoardo Tarantola Peloni still the keeper of the recipe in Bormio. Campari Group is based in Sesto San Giovanni, outside Milan.

That makes Braulio a sibling of several brands in this library. Averna, the Caltanissetta amaro whose company brought Braulio into the group, and Cynar, the artichoke amaro, are both Campari brands; Braulio is the group’s mountain amaro, defined by one town, one peak and one family of makers.

The brand’s own materials return again and again to the same elements: the Peloni pharmacy, the secret recipe, the oak barrels in the cellars and the mountain that gave the drink its name. Its English website calls the drink an “Italian aged amaro” and “the alpine gem aged in the heart of the mountain.”

For a design guide, Braulio shows how a brand can build its whole register from a single place — a town, its cellars and the peak above it — and keep it through three changes of ownership. Compare Averna and Cynar, its stablemates at Campari. For this guide we use amber oak, cellar brown and Stelvio green with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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