Asmara Brewery

The plant stands on a site in Asmara that had been a depot for road-building materials, which is how its founder came to it. Luigi Melotti was an Italian engineer who arrived in Eritrea during the colonial period as a road-construction specialist; he set up the works in 1938 and it went into production in 1939, starting with liquor on a small scale and rudimentary equipment before beer became the main line. It was nationalised by the Derg during the war of independence and now trades as Asmara Brewery Corporation, employing over six hundred people and producing Asmara lager along with spirits. It also maintains a football club, which plays in the Eritrean Premier League and took the national championship in 2008 — a company town's worth of institution attached to a single brewery. The building belongs to the same Modernist-era construction of Asmara that produced Cinema Impero and the Fiat Tagliero, and which now carries UNESCO World Heritage listing. Obscurity follows from the country. Eritrea receives very few visitors, the beer is not meaningfully exported, and a brewery that supplies one national market and no other stays unknown outside it however long it has run.