Greece
Breweries on the map
Local Streets Beer
Third voice in Volos' brewing chorus, Local Streets Beer claims a neighbourhood anchor from its very name: that of the tsipouradika alleys, the seafront kiosks and the painted walls that make the city one of Greece's unofficial street-art capitals. The young microbrewery takes part in the Hellenic brewers' association open days, a sign of quick integration into the national craft family, and its urban beers slip into the bars between the university and the port. With Plastigga and the Volos Brewery it confirms a singular phenomenon: a mid-sized Thessalian city fielding three microbreweries, a density rare in Greece outside Athens.
Pineios Brewery (Lola)
On the Sykourio road, on the edge of Larissa, Zythopoiia Pineiou borrows its name from the Pineios, the river that crosses the Thessalian capital before forcing its way between Olympus and Ossa through the Tempe valley. Its Lola range waters a city said to have Greece's most cafés per capita — ideal playing ground for a local beer — and the brewery takes part in the Hellenic brewers' association open days. In the heart of the country's great cereal plain, it is the logical beer of a terroir growing barley as far as the eye can see, to be tasted before climbing to Meteora or dropping to the sea at Agiokampos.
Plastigga Brewery
Volos is the city from which Jason and the Argonauts set sail for the Golden Fleece, and the one where tsipouro is drunk to an untouchable ritual: small carafes, seafood mezze, packed tables of the tsipouradika. Into this demanding setting the Zythopoiia Plastigga — 'the scales' — installed its kettles, at the foot of Pelion, the Centaurs' mountain whose stone villages overlook the Pagasetic Gulf. Its craft beers give the Voliotes a local alternative to the ritual of the still, and visitors one more reason to linger on the seafront before the Sporades ferry or the climb to Makrinitsa. Tsipouro, at last, has competition.
No brewery for this initial.