La Buttiga is a craft beer room situated at the far end of Via Paolo Sarpi in Milan’s Chinatown. As you may know by now, I’m a craft beer enthusiast, so this means that Buttiga is one of my favorites.

This small taproom is one of the few single-brand pubs in Milan and serves craft beers from the Buttiga brewery, based in Piacenza, some 70 km south of Milan. Before we discovered Buttiga, most of our beer nights passed sitting around a table, but this spot has made the casual standing hangout totally legit: this taproom literally gets packed with people and good mood from 17:00 on every day and it’s as cheerful as it gets.

There’s about ten taps and more bottled beers, all from La Buttiga: on each tap there’s a brief description of the beers – my favorite being the Rye 3 IPA, which is named after the least boring of the Italian public TV channels (a pun for Rai 3). Also there’s a few snacks and merchandise, including the traditional beer stein for the regulars.

A grumpy customer once left a bad review about Buttiga – with bad spelling, incidentally – and that’s why the staff often wear a T-shirt that says that they’re plain arrogant. Don’t mind that: of course, both the beers and the service at Buttiga are just spot on.