Region & History

When was the first beer brewed in South Tyrol? A document from 993 mentions a farmer in Val Pusteria who, alongside ten buckets of wine, also had to deliver twenty buckets of beer. Brewing has gone on here for over a thousand years, yet for a long time beer was considered a drink of common folk. The nobility stuck to wine.

The relationship remained tense. Emperor Leopold is said to have had surplus beer houses torn down in 1667, according to tradition. In the 19th century the tide turned: when the wine harvest failed or phylloxera took its toll, people turned to beer. By 1880, South Tyrol counted 27 breweries.

Then came the First World War. The division of Tyrol in 1919 cut off brewers south of the Brenner Pass from raw materials in Austria, and unfavorable tax laws under the Fascists made things worse. Most operations shut down. Forst survived and grew into one of Italy's major beer brands.

Forst is a district of Algund near Meran. In 1857, Meran town clerk Franz Tappeiner and farmer Johann Wallnöfer founded the brewery there; in 1863, Josef Fuchs took over. According to the company, his descendants, the Fuchs von Mannstein family, now run it in the fifth generation. With around 700,000 hectoliters a year, Forst is South Tyrol's largest brewery.

Today the region once again has over twenty brewing licenses, most of them for craft breweries. One of these is Batzen Bräu in Bolzano, which brews in a tavern that, according to the house, has served beer since 1404. Beer from South Tyrol has no EU designation of origin; Italian law applies rather than the German Beer Purity Law.