Alto Mare Means High Seas, and the Can Goes to Venice

Slack Tide's new Italian pilsner takes its name from the Italian for high seas and puts a Venetian gondolier on the label. It reaches the Clermont taproom on Thursday.

• Style: Italian Pilsner
• Release Date: 2026-09-10
• ABV: 4.6%
• Slack Tide Brewing Co. (Clermont, NJ)

Slack Tide Brewing Co. adds an Italian pilsner to its lineup on Thursday. Alto Mare is 4.6 percent, and the brewery translates the name from Italian as high seas, a nod it ties to both the open horizon and the beer's crisp character.

The label takes the theme considerably further than the name does. It is a woodcut-style illustration of a gondolier working a gondola through choppy water, with the campanile of St Mark's and the arcades of the Doge's Palace standing behind him. Venice, on a beer brewed in Cape May County.

Slack Tide describes a clear straw gold pour with a frothy white head and a light, bready malt foundation, and calls the result crisp and snappy.

Italian pilsner is a young style with an unusually traceable origin. It goes back to Tipopils, a dry-hopped pilsner first brewed at Birrificio Italiano in Lombardy in the mid-1990s, and the defining move is exactly that: a German-style pilsner given a generous dry hop of continental noble hops. The aroma turns herbal and floral without the beer drifting away from its clean, dry base. Slack Tide's own notes stay on the malt side of the beer, so how far this one leans into the hopping is a question for the glass.

Alto Mare arrives Thursday, September 10 at the Clermont taproom.