It took a few months, but my feature story on craft beer in Italy finally appeared in the NYT travel section this weekend. Seeing it, I started thinking again about Italian beer culture and how different it is to the Czech Republic and other countries which are better known for beer and brewing.

The point I stressed in my first post from the Italian beer trail is part of it: in Italy, the enthusiasm for beer is very high. But beyond mere enthusiasm is something that seems to be missing from the beer culture in the Czech lands and in Germany: education.

Take a look at the photo above, and in particular the big sign on the right. This was taken in the fabulous Eataly grocery store in Turin — a sort of massive, Italian take on Whole Foods — and the sign stands at the entrance right when you walk in, quite far from the store’s extensive beer department in the cellar.

The sign asks if you know the difference between Belgian white beer and German Weizenbier, and then goes on to explain the differences between the two styles in terms of ingredients, tasting notes, and suggested dishes to pair with each. It then lists some examples from its stock.

Please tell me if you’ve ever seen a display in any other grocery store which explains the nuances of two  similar wheat beer styles.

I know that I’ve never found anything even remotely like that in the Czech Republic, though it sounds like a great idea: there isn’t much awareness that such things as beer styles even exist here, let alone beer styles beyond our borders. (And it’s not just the average consumer who remains in the dark. At a tasting last month in Prague, I heard a brewer mention to someone from the beer consumers’ movement that a particular Hefeweizen tasted like a Belgian wit, and the man from the consumer movement had to ask what that was.)

Of course, if you only sell one type of beer, there’s no need to educate consumers about what kind it is and the distinctions between it and another style. Considering the Czech Republic’s pale lager consumption rate of 95% and the country’s continuing mergers and brewery closures, I’m afraid most people would say there isn’t much point to beer education here.

But there are forces working against the tide. Last week I stopped by Tlustá Koala to try the new stout from Pivovar Kocour Varnsdorf. Not only did I recognize the distinctive Kocour logo and colors on the tap, but when I took my seat I was surprised to find a brochure from the brewery explaining just what a stout is, how it is made and how it should taste. “Don’t be afraid,” it said.

No, I thought. Suddenly I wasn’t afraid at all.

Let’s say my father-in-law is not a beer guy — when it comes to drinking for pleasure, we’re talking wine. But like most people here, he regularly drinks beer with meals, the same way that people in other European countries down mineral water: at every lunch and every dinner, there is one bottle of medium- or low-strength pale lager from Platan, his local brewery, on the table. This makes his beer consumption just about average for a citizen of the Czech Republic: just about one half-liter a day, just about every day of the year. But if it’s a question of his preferred beverage, it’s vino, generally Moravian, generally white, and generally very good.

But that still doesn’t explain the Mussolini beer.

In fact, almost nothing explains the Mussolini beer, only that some friends of his came back from Italy and the Mussolini beer showed up shortly afterwards. About a month before, my wife and I had gone to Italy to research a story on the Italian craft brewing scene, and we brought back several great Italian brews, the kind of rare ales and lagers that obsessive beer heads around the world lose sleep and twitch over before they finally get to tick their names off lengthy lists. Panil Barriquée. The outrageously good Oppale from 32 via dei Birrei. Three bottles of Montegioco. The full line of Birrificio Grado Plato. Don’t even get me started on Baladin.

Some of those beers I shared with my father-in-law in a sort of defense-by-way-of-goodwill gesture, as if to say, “Yes, I do write about beer, but the stuff I’m writing about is not quite the same as your lunchtime substitute for Perrier.” In fact I believe my father-in-law actually enjoyed some of these brews, and I suppose word got out to his friends that beers from Italy were not that bad. He seemed especially impressed by Grado Plato’s rich Chocarrubica, a chocolate-and-carob-flavored stout with a prodigious amount of oats, which makes it very lush and full in the mouth. (Dare I say it is winelike?)

So after sampling a few Italian bottles with me, the mere mention of which would cause tremors and a quick Pavlovian response from any real beer fan, my father-in-law got an Italian bottle of his own as a gift. I felt my eyebrows rise up when he first mentioned it. I wanted to try Baladin’s Xyauyù again, or maybe one of the brews from Troll, or anything — absolutely anything — from Milan’s great Lambrate brewpub, a place that I still remember with a long sigh and the image of heaven placed on earth.

Instead, I saw Il Duce.

La Birra del Duce, it said on the side of the label, along with the image of Benito making what was either a girlish wave or a fascist salute. In the right corner was a Roman fasces. At the top — where a normal label would say something like “Produced with the finest barley malt, fragrant hops and pure spring water” — were the words Dio, Patria, Famiglia, which I read as God, Homeland and Family.

So much for Baladin and Lambrate. Instead, I was facing a gimmick which would obviously be a waste of time. But I got out my notebook anyway.

(Does anyone really need a review of Mussolini’s beer? If you absolutely have to know, it’s surprisingly okay,  other than the disappointingly loose head and fizzy carbonation, with a decent aroma of hops and a lightly bitter finish. It’s definitely not great, though for a basic lager you could do far worse.)

But. Still.

Uncomfortable wasn’t the half of how I felt. This was a beer, it seemed, whose entire point of being was — at best — to play upon novelty or — at worst — to exploit fascist sympathies. It was impossible not to think of how much fascism had hurt this country, to say nothing of my father-in-law’s own family, and how stupid it was to sell a brew that made light of those tragedies. I had my problems with the beer itself — it was drinkable but uncharismatic; at one point I thought I got a cooked-corn whiff of dimethyl sulfide, though that could have just been my distaste for the God, Homeland and Family slogan — and the back of the label showed that the same company produced fascist wines as well, meaning that I wasn’t holding the product of a brewery so much as that of a marketing group.

But maybe I take these things — and beer — too seriously.

My father-in-law poured his own glass, which he sniffed and glanced at before taking a sip. His expression seemed to suggest that he didn’t understand what the big deal was with all these Italian beers, and why anyone really cared.

“It’s fine,” he said, putting the glass down and turning back to his dinner. He offered a small shrug. “It’s something to drink with a meal.”

On the label, Il Duce waved girlishly to his friends just beyond the frame.

I’ve just about recovered from the eight-day, 2,400-kilometer (1,500-mile) drive through Piedmont and Lombardy, though the impact of seeing northern Italy’s wonderful beer culture firsthand is going to be harder to get over. A case in point: I can’t quite forget the outstanding beer selection at the Eataly supermarket in Turin, pictured above.

Eataly is surely a special case: most supermarkets in Italy don’t carry legends like Thomas Hardy’s Ale, as well as vast selections of local craft brews like Baladin, Grado Plato, Troll and Montegioco. Nonetheless, the fact that a high-end food store like Eataly has a entire craft beer department — as well as an on-site beer restaurant — testifies to how successfully Italian craft brewers have pushed for their products to be seen as an integral part of fine food and drink.

In part this is due to the an obvious competition with wine, I think, which is probably the reason that Italian craft beers are often sold in .75-liter bottles, rather than half-liter standard in Central Europe.

Additionally, the bottles themselves are almost ridiculously well-designed, with great logos and excellent packaging. If you hand someone a bottle of Italian craft beer as a gift, it really looks like something special.

(Compare that to the tasteless, soft-porn labels from Slovakia’s Steiger. Or the goofy, hard-to-recognize packaging from the Czech Republic’s Strakonice.)

Unfortunately, the craft beer prices in Italy are often at the level of wine — and sometimes higher. At Eataly, two vintages of Baladin’s outstanding Xyauyù were priced just under €30 (currently $47, or about 750 Kč). Bottles of Grado Plato’s beautiful Chocarrubica — I really liked it, others did not — were around €9.

That’s hardly appealing to the least common denominator. In a country where overall beer consumption remains very low, Italian craft brewers seem to be striking out for the top of the market, abandoning the low ground almost entirely to the mass-produced Eurobeers. It’s an interesting approach, though I’m not sure it would be as successful in a country with higher beer consumption — and stronger beer traditions — such as the Czech Republic and Germany.

But what are the options? Can Czech craft brewers really hope to compete with growing juggernauts like Heineken, SABMiller and InBev when it comes to basic lagers? More importantly, will Czech consumers ever go for unusual craft beers produced with chocolate and other unusual ingredients? And when will the Czech market get around to recognizing that bottled beers can be as good or even better than draft?

Other than the second question, I really don’t know the answers. But I certainly wouldn’t be disappointed if more Czech brewers took aim at gourmet markets and fine-dining restaurants. After all, what have they got to lose?

It certainly wouldn’t hurt if Czech craft beer makers looked to their Italian cousins for inspiration, as well as for potential clients. For example, Eataly stocks hundreds of bottles of craft beer from all over Italy and all over the world. The only Czech bottles they carry, however, are those from Pilsner Urquell.

What beers do you bring home from a five-day tasting trip in Italy?

Unlike many more-established beer-loving countries, Italian beer culture is based in large part on bottles, rather than draft. (The Czech Republic is the opposite, with even some local experts arguing that tap beer is always, invariably, 100% better than bottled, the concept of bottle conditioning still somewhat unknown here in Lagerland.) This means that before you return, you can easily load your car up with beers and beer-related items. And when you zip down the Passo del Brennero into Austrian Tyrol, you’ll only go that much faster.

Here’s what we brought back with us.

One bottle of Panil Barriquée (8% alcohol by volume), a stunning or possibly disappointing brew aged 90 days in small oak barriques.

One bottle of Birra del Borgo’s KeTo Reporter (5.2%), a porter-style beer brewed with Kentucky Toscano tobacco.

One bottle of 32 Via dei birrai’s Oppale (5.5%), a well-received ale especially recommended by the lovely Flavia Nasini of A Tutta Birra.

One bottle of Birra Amiata’s Bastarda Rossa (7%), made with 20% Monte Amiata chestnuts.

One bottle of Iris Birra’s La castagnola (5%), a beer brewed with both chestnuts and chestnut honey.

Three bottles of Birrificio Grado Plato’s Strada S. Felice (8%), an excellent chestnut-flavored amber ale.

Four bottles of Grado Plato’s incredible Chocarrubica (7%), an outstanding dark resembling a chocolate stout, brewed over two days using infusions of cocoa and Sicilian carob and a 33% oat mash.

One big bottle of Birrificio Baüscia’s Gea barley wine (10.5%) from Milan’s amazing Decanter restaurant.

One paper-wrapped bottle each of Demon Hunter (8.5%), Draco (11%) and Runa (4.8%) from Birrificio Montegioco.

Two extremely green T-shirts from the Italia Beer Festival.

Two jars of lumache alla birra (escargots — as in snails — cooked in beer) from Elicicola Osaschese.

And that’s about it. Missing are the very hoppy beers from Birrificio Italiano, which we loved, though we’re hoping to get back there soon. And for those of you who can’t believe we returned from a beer tour of northern Italy without anything from Baladin, two caveats: we did manage to taste every beer at the Baladin pub, as well as many rare birds and oddities offered with the multi-course dinner with beer pairing at Casa Baladin. (Plus we brought home one jar of cherry preserves made by Teo Musso’s mother, produced from the leftover cherries from the brewery’s Mama Kriek.)

Most of these beers we picked up along the way or discovered at A Tutta Birra, a must-see for beer lovers in Milan. More on these and Italian beer culture in general once we unpack.

A quick post from the road: we’re in Italy after a night at the remarkable Nuovo Birrificio Italiano, part of a week in Piedmont and Lombardy researching Italian beer culture. (And in an attempt to build a few bridges, we have filled our car with some great Czech lagers, which, much like Johnny Appleseed, we are handing out in our wake.)

The most striking element of Italy’s brewing scene so far: unbound enthusiasm, from the brewers to the pubs to the serving staff and the customers. Czechs may drink more — far more, in fact, besting the Italians’ annual per capita consumption by some 130 liters — but the Italian beer fans we’ve met in the past few days are way more enthusiastic about their choice of beverage. Hearing people here talk about craft beer is like listening to a bunch of converts to a new religion or meeting a group of political revolutionaries (as opposed to culinary ones). Everywhere you look is the wide-eyed expression of the true believer.

A few observations from a few days on the road:

It seems to be no coincidence that some of the biggest stars of Italian craft brewing are from the same general area as the Slow Food movement (in Bra), Italy’s truffle capital (Alba) and legendary wines like Barolo.

Somewhat unsurprisingly, I have never eaten so well in a brewpub.

The variety of what is produced is hard to get your head around. Just at Nuovo Birrificio Italiano, Agostino Arioli (above) makes Tipopils and Extra Hop, a couple of high-grade Pilsner-style beers, a few very good ambers, a eye-opening Real Ale, as well as Cassissona, an outstanding cassis-flavored beer, and Scires, a partially wild-fermented sour cherry beer that he says is “not a kriek,” though it is remarkably complex, sour and sweet. (It makes a wonderful pairing with a nice goat cheese.) Most Czech craft beer makers have trouble sending out more than three or four brews, of which at least three are usually golden lagers. In terms of thinking outside the box, there is simply no box here.

Well, that’s about it for now. We’ll file another report from our next stop, the legendary Birreria Le Baladin. And when we get back (next week), we’ll finally announce the winners from our haiku contest / reader giveaway. Stay tuned…