Our History
Hello everyone and welcome to O’ Beerificio, the Neapolitan Brewery.
My name is Giovanni and here I would like to tell you more about my brewery background that led to the foundation of O’ Beerificio. Before moving forward, if you are interested to know more about myself, just visit this page.
My first batches
Everything started as a hobby in 2012, when I moved to Rome for working reasons. I bought my first brewing kit, after a lot of time spent in reading and asking questions about brewing beer on different forums.
The kit I bought from BirraMia was intended to brew a Weiss beer, and came with a plastic fermenter, the tap, the bubbler, the bottling tool, the metabisulfite (supposed for sanitizing the equipment), a can with liquid malt extract and yeast. While waiting for the delivery, I went to buy a thermometer and an aluminum pot because the ones I used for cooking were too small.
Everything I was expected to do was warming up the can, dilute it with some water, boil, chill, move it into the fermenter with some more water and pitch the yeast, and indeed that was what I did.
I warmed up the can, poured it in the aluminum pot with some extra water, boiled it for an hour, moved the pot in the sink (no i didn’t throw it away) to chill it, sanitized the fermentor with metabisulfite (spoiler is not a sanitizer), added some water and pitched the yeast.
After 2 days, when the fermentation started, I was so excited, a feeling that I never forgot.
The moment I was ready to bottle, I just realized that I was missing the small pipe to fill-up the bottles. Panic, but luckily i found a shop selling it and ran with my scooter to pick it up.
After 13 years of brewing, while reading what i am just writing, i realize all the mistakes done back then, but somehow after the 2 weeks of fermentation, and 2 weeks in the bottle with priming sugar something similar to a beer came out. I was really excited and invited all my friends to taste it, they all said it was good, but, 13 years later, I realize what is really meant for a good beer.
I named my first creation A’ Bionda Napulitan (the Neapolitan Blond for you not knowing Neapolitan yet).
Despite the result, i got really triggered to do better, I kept studying and bought my first book: Progettare Grandi Birre, the italian translation from the book of Ray Daniels – Designing Great Beers, the one with the blue cover and a pint of beer on it to be clear.
That book is actually the bible for home brewers and really teaches me a lot.
I brewed the second time with liquid extract again, same style again, but this time with a different yeast and pitching it to a lower temperature.
This time an improvement was already made, I built a chilling coil with copper.
The beer was much better than the first time, but was anyhow the last batch with extract as I was already projected to brew my first all grain.
To the all grain
Brewing my own beer was really becoming my passion, my hobby, my relief from the stress of life. The liquid extract was a good starting point, but I wanted to really do a proper batch using malts, hops, and yeast and start to understand the differences between all the different types.
Because the place where I lived was quite small, I didn’t have space to have the 3 kettles system so I went to buy one stainless steel kettle of 50 liters and brewed in a bag (BIAB).
To properly understand the difference from brewing with liquid extract to all grain, I searched for a Weiss recipe, ordered the malts (already crushed), hops and yeast and prepared for the batch.
During the mash, I really made a lot of mess once the time of lifting the bag arrived. I remember worth spoiled everywhere in the kitchen, but somehow, with the help of my girlfriend, I managed to lift it, squeeze it and dispose of the exhausted grains.
Once I tasted the first bottle I was really impressed, the quality of the beer was much higher and the more time spent was really worth it.
I brewed in BIAB for quite a while until I came to the Netherlands.
In my new house, I have quite some space and managed to dedicate some space for my hobby and that was the time of moving to the traditional 3 kettles system.
The Journey to O’ Beerificio
In the Netherlands, my hobby started to move forward with a different speed: maybe because of more time available for myself as well as more money available to spend for buying new equipment or building new things, I really managed to learn the most here compared with when I was living in Italy.
The cooking system improved quite a lot, after every batch there was something that could be optimized in the process and straight I was finding the way to fix or improve it. As of today, there are kettles, pumps, valves, agitators and more that are making the cooking process much safer and reliable.
I also managed to optimize the fermentation process with fridges, pressure fermentors, and so on as well as the bottling process that now is happening in counter pressure.
The learning process never stopped, and today I can say I know a lot about the overall process, ingredients, water, beer styles and techniques. Everything happening since 2012 gave me more confidence in presenting my products to a jury thus I found the courage to subscribe to some contests that confirmed the quality of my products.
The contests, and the positive feedback, are the last milestone in my brewing career and pushed me to think not only of a brewery but to have a proper project, something that is identifying the beers i am brewing and myself: why not linking my roots and my beers? How can I make sure that in every beer there is something connected to Naples?
As a result of those questions, NeaBrew was born. NeaBrew was an acronym of Neapolitan Brewer, but unfortunately after 3 years of it, a rebranding was necessary to avoid some legal issues. Then O’ Beerificio was born, taking all the heritage from NeaBrew.