The year was 1859. Italy didn’t exist yet. What did exist was chaos.
The city of Udine, tucked into the northeastern corner of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, was home to restless military camps, nationalistic fervor, and one entrepreneur named Luigi Moretti who noticed something crucial: all these soldiers were extremely thirsty.
Luigi had already been importing beer from elsewhere in the empire, but he realized what the region really needed was its own beer—something proudly, stubbornly Italian (even if Italy wasn’t technically a country yet). So he launched the Beer and Ice Factory, a name that sounds like something cooked up during a heatstroke but got the job done.
The first bottle of Birra Moretti was sold in 1860. That’s one year before the Kingdom of Italy was officially formed and seven years before the Friuli region even became part of it. Technically, Moretti was brewing an “Italian” beer for a country that didn’t exist yet. Trendsetter behavior.
For over 130 years, Birra Moretti stayed close to home—family-run, locally beloved, and brewed out of that original factory. Then came the ’80s, the sale to Labatt, and finally, the global glow-up under Heineken. But through it all, the recipe for L’Autentica—its flagship lager—has barely changed. It’s still just water, barley, corn, hops, and vibes.
Let’s talk about Baffo, the mustachioed man on every label since the 1950s. According to company lore, he was just a guy drinking a stein of Moretti at a trattoria when a Moretti exec asked to take his picture. But depending who you believe, the image may have been lifted from a 1939 photo of a Tyrolean farmer by German photographer Erika Groth-Schmachtenberger. There’s even a rumor the rights were signed away. Either way, Baffo stuck—and now, he’s basically the face of Italian beer.
But even legends get caught in modern nonsense. In 2017, Birra Moretti vanished from Tesco, the U.K.’s biggest grocery chain, thanks to a pricing fight sparked by Brexit. Eight Heineken brands got the axe, and Moretti was one of them. It took a full year for the lager to return to British shelves, proving that bureaucracy can, in fact, ruin a perfectly good beer.
Despite it all, Birra Moretti is now the best-selling draft lager in the U.K., outperforming even British-born staples like Carling. The brand has launched lemon radlers, sea-salt lagers, and non-alcoholic versions to keep up with the times—though most of these are still hoarded within Italy’s borders.
So next time you’re sipping a Moretti, remember: this isn’t just beer. It’s pre-Italy beer. It’s patriotic, slightly mythologized, and somehow survived both an empire and a grocery store beef.
Raise your glass to the original rebel lager. And to Baffo, wherever he came from.
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