Eastside Sud Est 33 Cl. (lattina)

Eastside’s Sud Est is the second stop on an imagined journey through southern Italy, begun with the Neapolitan 32 Dicembre and arriving today in Lecce, where an 11% Imperial Stout is brought to life, enriched with almond milk and coffee. The choice of ingredients comes from a ritual: every time the brewery travelled down to Salento to meet their friends at Bluebeat Lecce, the first stop after stepping off the train was the bar on the traffic island opposite the station, for an iced coffee, never to be called Lecce coffee unless you want to be taken for an outsider. Intrigued, the brewers traced its history back some eighty years, to when La Casa del Caffè was one of the very few bars in the city, visited for its extremely rare espresso machine but also because it was the only ice seller in Lecce. The owner began serving coffee chilled with sturdy ice chunks, ideal for cooling it gradually without watering it down, and later completed the recipe with a splash of almond milk, drawn from Puglia’s generous harvests, to soften the espresso’s assertive edges. From this age-old gesture comes Sud Est: a powerful, dark stout in which the roasted bitterness of coffee meets the velvety sweetness of almond, for an enveloping sip that tells the story of Salento one glass at a time.