Aventia

THE LEGEND

Aventicum was the capital of Roman Helvetia, the administrative heart of what is now western Switzerland. At its height in the second century, the city held twenty thousand inhabitants, a forum, an amphitheater seating sixteen thousand, public baths, temples, and a six-kilometer defensive wall. It was Rome transplanted north of the Alps, a statement in stone that the empire’s reach extended even into the lands of the Helvetii.

But Aventicum was not purely Roman. Its patron deity, Aventia, was a local goddess absorbed into the Roman pantheon through the practice of interpretatio Romana, the systematic merging of conquered peoples’ gods with Roman equivalents. Aventia was Celtic in origin, a tutelary spirit of place, the kind of deity who did not govern abstract domains like war or love but instead protected a specific piece of ground. Her name became the city’s name. Her identity became inseparable from the walls she guarded.

The ruins of Aventicum still stand in modern Avenches. The Tornallaz tower rises above the old amphitheater. Columns mark where temples once burned incense to a goddess who was both Celtic and Roman, local and imperial. It is a place where two civilizations met and, rather than destroying each other, built something that honored both.

Aventia is brewed in that spirit of disciplined fusion. A West Coast IPA at 6.9% ABV, it is built on a lean, crisp pilsner frame, precise as Roman engineering, then layered with firm bitterness, strawberry, ripe stone fruit, and dank pine. Celtic wildness within Roman structure. The crossroads holds.