We stopped in for dinner at my favorite local Italian place the other night. It was cold, (very), we were tired (very), and pizza, cooked and served by someone else, definitely appealed.

We went with a traditional hand-tossed Pepperoni, which took no time at all to decide, but then, faced with several on-tap beers, we had to pause. We could go with a local Seattle microbrew, like Mac and Jack, or Pyramid's Hefweissn, both of which we like and work well with pizza, but then my eye was caught by an unfamiliar name in the list of brews "Peroni (Italy)."

We ordered a pitcher of Peroni, and yes, it was perfect with the pizza. I've been told that Peroni is to Italy what Budweiser is to America; the quintessential Italian beer. A lager, it has an alcohol level of 4.7, which I'm told is not really unusually low for European beers. You can taste the hops, but they're not bitter or over-powering. It's the palest beer, in color, I've ever seen—a lovely pale gold, looking more like a white wine or pear cider than beer, though it's dry rather than sweet. It's a super beer to have with food— I suspect it would go particularly well with subtle flavors and lighter Asian cuisines.

Peroni Beer was established in Vigevano Italy in 1846 by Fransico Peroni, and it's now the dominant beer in Italy, though the Peroni family no longer owns the business. Peroni, like British ale brewer Castle and U. S. brewer Miller is owned by the South African brewery conglomerate SAMiller. Nontheless, you can still visit one of the earliest of the family's four breweries, the antica birreria Peroni, the Peroni brew pub in Rome, on the Via di S. Marcello. You can even buy modern, accurate, reproductions of the ceramic pitchers Italian parents sent with a child to be filled at the brewery.

About 35 years ago Peroni decided to create a premium lager, and came up with Peroni Nastro Azzurro. A lager, with an alcohol level of 5.1%, it's been fairly popular as an export; you can easily find it in a bottle in the U. S. The name "Nastro Azzurro" means "blue ribbon"; a sobriquet chosen as an indication of the confidence, and pride, Peroni had in their new beer. The Peroni Web site has a series of interesting videos about Nastro Azzurro and Peroni. You likely note, as I did, that the brewmaster even describes Peroni as a "pizza beer."

It's clear from the Italian site for Peroni that they are the dominant, even "generic" beer in Italy, with strong cultural associations with Sicily. Peroni Italy made unfortunate headlines a year ago when a sexist advertisement offended a group of female attorneys who sued the beer maker.