The following “old” Albanian beer-everie is excerpted from my ongoing online memoir, first appearing on July 29, 2024: 40 Years in Beer (Book II) Part 54: New Albanians on beer holiday in Old Albania (1994). Albania in 1994 was a traumatized country in recovery — from decades of communism and centuries of mountainous isolation. It was enough to make a tourist awfully thirsty, and during my first visit, two brewery tours highlighted the long road yet to be traveled by Albania’s nascent brewing industry.
The Korçë Brewing Experience.
The history of commercial brewing in Albania is confined to the decades since 1900. There is no evidence to indicate that beer was a factor during five centuries of Turkish domination, although wine and raki (indigenous firewater) make appearances throughout pre-20th century Albanian history and lore.
For the record, raki is the chill-relieving, euphoria-promoting and paint-thinning social beverage of choice in Albania, and the Albanian wines we tasted were honest, if not spectacular, alternative beverages.
The first commercial brewery in Albania in the 20th century was built in 1928 by an Italian company in the southeastern city of Korçë (KOR-che). The city is located in a fertile agricultural valley nestled in rugged mountains and is renowned for commerce (ancient trading routes with Greece and Macedonia), erudition (the first Albanian language school was founded in Korçë), ethnic culture, and as a hotbed of Albania’s 20th-century quest for national identity.
We found the decaying brewery on a tree-lined avenue at the outskirts of the compact city. Bulky iron gates bore the “Birra Korçë” name in simple, red block letters. On the side of a building several yards away, a curiously pristine Communist-era historical marker noted the heroic action of anti-fascist partisans in 1945, who helped to liberate the area by burning some of the brewery’s storage buildings.
As Agim translated the words, I asked myself: How could this really be a victory if the beer wasn’t liberated prior to the destruction of its home? Certainly the ideological struggle against capitalism might be suspended for a few rounds prior to the lighting of the arsonist’s torch?
The Korçë brewery reeked of faded, degraded elegance. It was constructed in the traditional tower layout, with the barley conveyed to the top for milling, the...Read more
