From BeerAndSoul.com – Please view the original article here.
Monday Jan. 31st 2011: We spent our morning winding our way over the Alps and eventually into the snowy foothill town of Saluzzo, home to one of Piemonte’s most notorious maximum-security prisons, the Rodolfo Morandi Penitentiary. In addition to housing a cross-section of the region’s most violent criminals – minimum sentence is 15yrs – the penitentiary is home to the Pausa Cafe brewery. Pausa Cafe is a Torino-based NGO dedicated to a trio of simple goals:
- Supporting organic/fair trade agriculture.
- Developing sustainable economies for struggling indigenous cultures.
- Creating a vertically integrated, ‘no middle-men’ business models to employ/rehabilitate the disadvantaged/incarcerated in Italy.
They do this all by making first coffee, then chocolate and now a line of beers that are truly world class. The program is the brainchild of three founding philanthropists and the brewery is run under the closely watched passion of Andrea Bertola, inarguably one of Italy’s top 5 brewers. A fascinating and eminently quotable man, Andrea has served as Pausa Cafe’s Brewmaster since the brewery’s inception in 2004.
Upon our arrival at the prison, we were buzzed in through the outer gate and into a safety perimeter crowded w/ uniformed guards, medical personnel and prison vehicles. After depositing all non-essential possessions and clothing into an external prison locker, we passed through an airport-like security process, trading our passports for security badges before being lead through the 40ft-high blast-proof wall and into the empty prison grounds.
A friendly but silent uniformed guard led us on a brief, quarter mile walk through the prison’s deserted, snow-covered interior. We were directed to small concrete brewery building adjacent to the facility’s towering multi-story cellblock. Once inside, the small brewery was as stark a contrast to its grey sullen surroundings as one could imagine. Painted with bright reds and yellows, bubbling, noisy, and vibrant with enthusiastic employees and observers.
Under constant observation of a rotating team of guards, we conducted a lively and inspiring interview and survey of new, experimental beers with Andrea – an engaging, but soft-spoken bohemian with tousled black hair, who might look more at home peddling homemade treats at a Phish concert than he does inside a maximum security detention center. Afterward, we were handed over to Pausa’s young 30-something Head Brewer, Stefano. Fluent in English Stefano was an intense and focused young man with a soldier-like demeanor only betrayed by the abundant joy he clearly takes from his job. He led us through a succinct tasting of 10+ beers, a pear cider, and few genre-defying unreleased oddities. He stressed that each beer incorporated local organic ingredients and/or organic fair trade product from Pausa’s surrogate coffee/cacao-producing operations in Central America.
Stefano is a whip smart and gracious host, an encyclopedia of Italian food/wine/beer history, and an ambassador that any brewery would love to have in their employ. We were shocked nearly 4hrs into our visit when he shared that he is also an inmate serving a 27yr murder sentence in the facility. Once a young chef, restaurant owner, and aspiring Sommelier, he told us how the job with Pausa Cafe, and the opportunity to be Andrea’s apprentice has been an opportunity for him to transcend his incarceration. I struggled to keep from looking visibly shaken as Stefano choked back tears explaining how brewing, alone, is what gives structure, value and forward momentum to his life. A life that otherwise would be spent in suspended animation, alone in a cell.
I was struck by the irony of how similar what Pausa is doing is to the ethos behind Trappist brewing. An inmate in a prison, a monk in a monastery, both share a decidedly different relationship to time, profitability and success. Both are allowed to labor in the pursuit of slow gestating, uncompromised beer. For both the work itself provides the reward; in the case of the Trappist it is serving a higher calling, for Stefano a sense of purpose that makes a tragic life bearable and offers a reason to focus on today and tomorrow, as opposed to dwelling on a dark past.