Why you should experience Buttiga Beer Room in Milan, Italy.
Buttiga Beer Room is a characterful craft-beer pub where Chinatown's workshop-lined commercial corridor meets a Piacenza brewery born inside a fifteenth-century farmstead, independent Italian brewing and a taproom created to place the producer directly behind the bar.
Set along Via Paolo Sarpi near Via Giordano Bruno and just steps from the eastern edge of Piazza Gramsci, the pub occupies a pedestrianized Chinatown corridor shaped by the Chinese silk workers who began settling around its courtyard workshops during the 1920s. The compact room keeps the brewery visually dominant through a long bar and closely grouped taps, with bottles and cans extending the selection beyond draught pours. Timber surfaces, exposed brick and brewery graphics give the interior the directness of a producer-owned taproom, leaving little separation between service counter and drinker. A street-facing terrace carries the Beer Room onto Sarpi itself, placing Buttiga within the pedestrian movement that now defines the district's principal commercial artery. The result is a Chinatown pub whose small dimensions keep the encounter focused on the Piacenza brewery and the beers that drove its expansion into Milan.
What you should know about Buttiga Beer Room.
Buttiga Beer Room is best known for turning La Buttiga's Piacenza brewing project into its first permanent Milan outpost after four friends, Stefano, Nicola, Luca and Isacco, took control of the brewery in 2011. The business they acquired had begun in 2008 as Piacenza's first microbrewery, and their production remained inside a fifteenth-century rural court whose former breeding-bull stable supplied the bull that became La Buttiga's emblem and the origin of its “Bevi come un Toro” motto. Rapid growth forced a production overhaul in 2013, when the partners installed a larger brewing system, pursued greater stability across their beers and intensified experimentation as distribution spread through Italy. Milan became the next structural turn: following a temporary experiment, the shutter at Via Paolo Sarpi 64 rose in December 2016, and the Beer Room entered permanent operation in March 2017 as the brewery's first direct urban taproom. Its success produced a second Beer Room at Cassina de' Pomm on the Martesana in May 2019, followed by further Milan openings between 2020 and 2022. Demand generated by the taprooms and wider distribution eventually exceeded the capacity of the original Piacenza site, pushing La Buttiga into a new production headquarters equipped with new machinery in May 2022. Competitive recognition developed alongside that expansion: Pils in Love and Psycho IPA were selected in Slow Food's 2015 Italian beer guide, Black Shit Monster placed second in its category at Birra dell'Anno 2019, Pils in Love received a 2021 Birra dell'Anno mention and La Buttiga earned an Excellence distinction in Slow Food's Birre d'Italia 2025. The brewery's namesake Buttiga received another Birra dell'Anno mention in 2026, extending a sequence in which the Sarpi taproom grew from a single Milan experiment into the first node of a multi-location operation supported by an increasingly decorated brewery.
Pils in Love introduces La Buttiga's lower-fermentation side through a 4.5% Italian Pilsner whose German hops bring floral aroma and spice over a pale malt foundation before a dry bitterness closes the sip. Psycho IPA pushes in another direction at 7.6%, combining American and Oceanian hops with caramelized malt across grapefruit, passion fruit and a formidable 99.8 IBU. Acà Toro lowers the intensity through a 4.9% Pale Ale developed with Brewberry and punk band Punkreas, pairing grassy hopping with tropical fruit in a collaboration that connects brewing directly with music. GöSlar 1826 uses wheat, lactic bacteria, bergamot and Fleur de Sel de Camargue to create acidity, citrus and salinity, placing fermentation technique ahead of hop force. Sophia folds coriander, sweet orange peel, lime peel and rose petals into a 4.2% blanche, and the seasonal Mia Zia Session IPA brings pineapple and mango into a leaner 3.8% body. The taps consequently move through lager fermentation, assertive hopping, lactic acidity, botanicals and collaborative recipes, giving a single brewery enough technical range to sustain the Beer Room without relying on a generic multi-producer selection.
How to fold Buttiga Beer Room into your trip.
Buttiga Beer Room works as the evening endpoint for an outing through the Sarpi-Monumentale area that follows Milan from nineteenth-century commemorative architecture into tram manufacturing and the cultural conversion of its industrial inheritance.
Begin at Cimitero Monumentale, where Milan selected Carlo Maciachini's competition proposal in 1863 and opened the new cemetery for burials on November 2, 1866, consolidating functions previously distributed among smaller burial grounds. Maciachini combined Gothic, Lombard Romanesque and fifteenth-century architectural references across the complex; the central ossuary followed in 1873 and the Famedio reached completion in 1887, creating a civic pantheon subsequently associated with figures including Alessandro Manzoni, Carlo Cattaneo and Salvatore Quasimodo. Continue to Fabbrica del Vapore, whose industrial history began in 1899 when Antonio Carminati, Giuseppe Pozzi and Carlo Toselli established an operation for constructing and repairing railway and tram rolling stock near Via Messina. Expansion produced the Società Italiana Carminati Toselli in 1907, employment reached 1,350 workers in 1919 and the plant built the first prototype of Milan's model 1928 tram in 1928, beginning a production run exceeding 500 vehicles before the company ceased activity in 1935. Conclude at ADI Design Museum, housed since 2021 inside a converted industrial complex devoted to the historical collection generated by the Compasso d'Oro, the Italian design award created in 1954 from an initiative by Gio Ponti and La Rinascente. The collection gathers hundreds of award-winning objects and projects across decades of Italian industrial design, carrying the surrounding district's manufacturing history into a culture centered on the design of objects themselves. The progression moves from Maciachini's nineteenth-century civic architecture through Carminati Toselli's mechanization of Milanese transport into the institutional preservation of Compasso d'Oro design, tracing the surrounding district's shift from commemoration and manufacturing toward contemporary design culture.
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