Evans Ale at the Salone del Gusto
by Jennifer Matrazzo and George de Piro

What do chocolate-covered pumpkin seeds from Austria, donkey salami from Italy, and beers from all over the world have in common?  All were available for tasting pleasure at Salone del Gusto, the five-day intercontinental collision of taste and culture presented by the International Slow Food Movement.  Slow Food is an organization spanning five continents and boasting 60,000 members, half of whom reside in Italy.  Membership is open to any interested party and, although the organization enjoys only modest membership in the United States, local chapters, or convivia, can be found throughout the country.


Slow Food members organize the Salone del Gusto, or Hall of Taste, biennially at the Lingotto center, a former Fiat factory which has been converted into an enormous convention center in Turin, Italy.  The festival showcased food and beverage produced by hundreds of companies committed to regional, seasonal, and organic comestibles crafted according to traditional methods – a feast for anyone who loves to taste, as well as an opportunity for festival-goers to sample food and drink not readily available in their particular corner of the world.

We worked all five days of the festival, pouring beers from ten American breweries, including our own C.H. Evans Brewing Company.  We brought our award-winning Kick-Ass brown, Pump Station Pale and State Street Porter.  Some of the other breweries there were Brooklyn, Deschutes, Lefthand/Tabernash and Kona (from Hawaii).


Despite about eight weeks of warm storage while the beers were shipped over to Italy, some of them tasted pretty good.  Our pale ale faired the best out of the Evans beers, and Brooklyn Black Chocolate Stout and Lefthand/Tabernash Imperial Stout were also quite tasty.  Surprisingly (to me, anyway), a light-tasting lager from Kona traveled really well.


Jenn, Association of Brewers president Charlie Papazian, and his wife Sandra serving the masses.

Most of the 138,000 festival attendees were Italian, and since neither Jenn nor I speak our ancestral tongue, describing the beers was a bit of a challenge.  Fortunately, Eric Wallace from Lefthand/Tabernash is quite fluent and wrote up a list of beer descriptors.  As people approached the stand, often with some visible trepidation, we would say, “assagio?”  (taste)  They would most often reply that they would like a taste, which then prompted the utterance of the words, “dolce o amara?  Chiara o scura?”  (sweet or bitter, light or dark).  We could gauge people’s opinions of the beers by the look on their face and their requests for seconds.  There were plenty of requests for seconds!


There is an Italian craft brewing scene, although it is just in its infancy.  Having searched for beer in several Italian cities over the past two years, it is clear that these brewers are truly courageous.  Quite often, “birra ala spina” (draft beer) does not even have a tap marker at local cafés.  People seem to care only if the beer is draft or bottled, having little concern about brand, and finding any Italian beer is challenging.  Indeed, Italy seems like it could be a most difficult place to market artisinal beer.

There were some other beers at the Salone, including a selection of cask-conditioned beers from England.  The most notable of these was Orkney Brewery’s MacGregor Red, with a big hop nose, and a touch of sulphury “home-perm” aroma.  Medium-bodied, with a nice malt-hop balance, this proved to be my favorite session beer of the festival, although the Ayinger booth had some highly-drinkable offerings, too.

The Italian craft brew booth had several unique offerings, most of which were in the upper range of alcohol content.  One memorable beer, named “Super,” was a malty, light amber beer with 8% alcohol and a pleasant finish in which malt and hops balanced well.  My favorite Italian beer was Panil Barriquée, a brown, richly malty strong ale with the wonderful, earthy characteristics of Brettenomyces.  I had more than one!

Italian craft brewers ready at their taps


Beer was just a small part of this festival, however.  Throngs of people slowly scoured over dozens of aisles packed with booths exhibiting everything  from wine to whiskey, chocolate to cured meat.  And cheese.  Slow Food considers pasteurized-milk cheese a threat to deeply embedded cultural traditions, as well as a generally boring and homogenized product.  Positing the official Manifesto in Defense of Raw-milk Cheese, Slow Food is committed to preserving a market for raw-milk cheese and its unusual flavors and aromas.  Indeed, a single sample from any of the numerous offerings of la via del formaggio would have been enough to inspire even the most committed fast-food junkie to ditch the Velveeta slices.  Saval cheese, velvety and Welsh; artisan cheddar from Britain, sharply fruity with earthy undertones; Spanish gamonedo, creamy, peppery and blue.  And of course, the Italian mainstays – gorgonzola,  pecorino, mozzarella (made from unpasteurized buffalo milk).

Pointing to the folly of fast living, Slow Food seeks to banish the degrading and disruptive effects of fast food and asks you to make like a snail and, well, slow down.  Slowing down establishes the time to seek out quality food and the openness to derive pleasure from that food.  To this effect, Slow Food devotes a tremendous amount of energy to palate education through taste workshops.  We attended several such laboratori del gusto, where participants were encouraged not only to taste with several senses (sight, smell, touch, as well as taste), but were further reminded about the essential connection people have with the earth.  It makes perfect sense, of course, that the kind of grass a cow eats affects the taste of the cheese produced from its milk, or that soil-type and terrain contribute to the quality, and therefore taste, of the grapes used to ferment wine.  Yes, it makes sense, but how often do we think of it this way?

Suppose, for a moment, that we always thought of it this way.  How would this alter the way we live our lives, the way we choose our food, the way we relate to the earth?  If soil, sunlight, air, and water are the rawest materials of our food supply, then why are they often treated with such negligence, or even abuse?   In promoting environmental sustainability, Slow Food seeks to resuscitate human commitment to the land and its elements.

As members of workshop panels related histories and theories of production to their audiences, the bond between food and culture became obvious.  Parmigiano reggiano is just as interwoven with the history and tradition of Italy as the canals of Venice and the statue of David.  Slow Food defends cultural heritage through the support of the traditional food-producing techniques that ensure biodiversity.  As each of these traditions interact uniquely with the environment, they maintain the biodiversity that is essential to both our planet and our palates.  Food and ecology are forever bound and the diversity of one guarantees the diversity of the other.

Five days of the Salone left us wanting more.  There is something exalting about a global marketplace of local, hand-crafted products.  The festival is a homage to the generations of knowledge implicit to every wheel of cheese, every sip of wine, every bite of food.  Slow Food wants to impose values on your taste buds.  Slow Food wants you to discover your kitchen table as secular holy land, a center of tradition where food offers both contentment and communion.  So slow down, sit back, and enjoy.

For more information about the Slow Food International Movement, visit their website at Slowfood.com

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