Two men from Merano and a spring at the foot of the mountains.

Forst takes its name from its place. The brewery stands in Forst — Foresta in Italian — a hamlet of Algund (Lagundo), on the edge of Merano in South Tyrol, Italy’s mainly German-speaking northern province. Italian Wikipedia notes that when the brewery was founded the hamlet belonged to the neighbouring village of Marling (Marlengo). The company calls itself Birra Forst in Italian and Spezialbier-Brauerei Forst in German, and German Wikipedia says it was also once known as Forsterbräu.

It was founded in 1857 by two men from Merano, Johann Wallnöfer and Franz Tappeiner; German Wikipedia describes Tappeiner as the town clerk of Merano and Wallnöfer as a farmer. Italian Wikipedia, citing Roman Drescher’s 2012 history Bier in Südtirol, says the business passed in 1863 to Josef Fuchs, who built the brewery beside a spring below the mountain the Italians call Monte San Giuseppe. The company says the site was chosen for its spring water, for natural ice that could be stored to cool the cellars in summer, and for good roads, and that it has stayed on the same ground ever since.

Forst says the business has remained with the same family for five generations. Its own timeline records that Fanny Fuchs took over from her husband Hans in 1917 and ran the brewery until 1933, when it passed to their son Luis. In 1989 Margarethe Fuchs, Luis Fuchs’s wife, became president, BRAUWELT International reported in 2016, and she later handed the executive role to her daughter, Margherita Fuchs von Mannstein. The Italian food site Dissapore, citing La Stampa, reported in 2022 that she had been president since 2015. The company names her as president alongside her two daughters, Cellina von Mannstein and Cordula Wolf. BRAUWELT International called Forst one of the few privately owned breweries in Italy.

Kronen, Sixtus and a brewery in the mountains.

Forst makes lagers and strong beers in the German and Austrian tradition, but under Italian rules. German Wikipedia points out that its beer is not brewed to the German Reinheitsgebot: Italian food law allows grains other than barley malt, and Forst uses maize grits, which the company also lists among its ingredients alongside malt, hops and spring water.

Its range, as listed by Italian and German Wikipedia and the company, includes Forst Premium, a pale lager; Kronen, which Italian Wikipedia calls the brewery’s main beer; V.I.P. Pils; 1857, a pale beer created for the brewery’s 150th anniversary; Sixtus, a dark doppelbock; a Heller Bock; and an unfiltered Felsenkeller Bier — Felsenkeller means rock cellar, and German Wikipedia says ice stored in winter once cooled the brewery’s rock cellars in summer. Italian Wikipedia adds two seasonal beers, an Easter beer and a Christmas brew. The company dates a partnership with the Weihenstephan brewery in Bavaria to 1969.

The plant has been modernised in stages. Italian Wikipedia, citing the architecture magazine Detail, says a large new brewhouse designed by the Bolzano firm Stahlbau Pichler opened in 2011; the company dates the laying of its foundation stone to 2009, and says a new maturation cellar opened in 2021. Each winter the brewery grounds host a Christmas event the company calls the Foresta Natalizia, the Christmas Forest.

Forst reaches the rest of Italy through other places too. Italian Wikipedia says that in 1948 the company signed a contract with the Sicilian brothers Andrea and Francesco Vesco giving their Palermo bottling business, CISPA, exclusive rights to bottle and supply Forst beer across Sicily, and German Wikipedia describes a bottling plant in Palermo that supplies the island. The company also runs Forst beer halls and restaurants, mainly in northern Italy, and Italian Wikipedia says it controls the Spiller chain of beer restaurants.

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 family group with Menabrea inside it.

Forst is also a group. The Biella brewery Menabrea says it became part of the Forst group in 1991, in an agreement signed by Paolo Thedy, and that it kept its own identity; German Wikipedia dates the link to the 1990s. Forst also sells mineral water, including Meraner Mineralwasser, the water of Merano, and English Wikipedia says it makes soft drinks through a subsidiary called Kaiserwasser.

The brewery’s South Tyrolean roots show in its sponsorships. German Wikipedia lists among them FISI, Italy’s winter sports federation, and FC Südtirol, the province’s professional football club. It also reproduces a Forsterbräu advertisement printed in the Bolzano newspaper Der Landsmann on 14 March 1925.

In 2024, the company says, Forst was recognised by the Italian government as a Marchio Storico di interesse nazionale, a historic trademark of national interest.

For a design guide, Forst shows how a brewery can build its identity on one place and one family name. Compare Menabrea, the Piedmont brewery in its group, and Birra Poretti, another northern Italian brewery founded by a man who had worked in the German-speaking world. For this guide we use a deep red, a forest green and a malt gold with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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