What does it actually mean to belong to a city?
Barcelona has a funny way of making you feel local and foreign at the same time. You can live here for years, know exactly where to get a vermut, have strong opinions about which neighbourhood is “too touristy,” and still occasionally feel like you’re borrowing the city from someone else.
That tension eventually became the starting point for Barri, a concept we created for Moritz.
But we didn’t begin with migration, belonging or community.
We began with the beer.
We drank our way into the concept
Before we had any concept, we had to taste the product.
Which was probably the first time nobody complained about the research phase.
It was a wheat beer with notes of banana, clove and spice. The ingredients stood out because it introduced something that didn’t feel immediately “Barcelona.” It felt travelled, imported, slightly unexpected.
Then we looked back at Moritz itself.
Moritz is one of those brands that feels completely embedded in Barcelona. It was founded in the city in 1856 and has spent more than 160 years building a relationship with local culture, neighbourhood life, terraces, food and everyday city rituals.
Except Moritz was founded by Louis Moritz, a German brewer who made Barcelona his home. That irony basically unlocked the project.
A brand could arrive from somewhere else and, over time, become deeply rooted in the identity of the city. So maybe the same thing could be true for people.
The ingredients started to work as a metaphor too. They travel, adapt, mix with what is already there and become part of something new without completely losing where they came from. That thinking later became part of the packaging rationale as well.
So the question shifted from “what kind of beer are we making?” to something much more useful:
What if belonging has less to do with where you’re from, and more to do with how you put down roots?
The neighbourhood is where it actually happens
Once we had that idea, the concept of Barri made sense pretty quickly.
Barcelona is the city, but the neighbourhood is where belonging becomes real. It’s the bar downstairs, the bakery that starts recognizing you, the terrace you somehow keep ending up at, the neighbour you only know by face but still greet every morning.
That’s the scale where a city stops feeling abstract.
So the neighbourhood became a meeting point between people who had always lived in Barcelona and people who had arrived later. The idea wasn’t about assimilation or pretending everyone had the same history. It was about coexistence.
The project used the idea of “Y” (“and” in english) as a symbol of that connection, joining people from here and people from somewhere else instead of making identity an either/or.
“Quiero sentir Barcelona como hogar”
That became the emotional insight behind the project.
Not “I want to become Catalan.”
Not “I want to discover the real Barcelona,” which is usually where someone starts trying to sell you a €7 cortado in El Born.
Just:
Quiero sentir Barcelona como hogar.
The audience we imagined was someone who had arrived in the city for work, studies or some temporary reason that quietly stopped being temporary. They had built routines, friendships, favourite places and a version of daily life that felt increasingly theirs.
They weren’t looking for the postcard version of Barcelona anymore.
They wanted the boring bits: the bakery downstairs, the same terrace every Sunday, knowing which supermarket queue somehow moves faster.
That’s usually when a city has you.
Making the beer feel like it had always been there
Visually, we wanted Barri to feel less like a shiny new product launch and more like something you could imagine already sitting behind the counter of a neighbourhood bar.
The identity mixed a romantic view of local life with something much more grounded: imperfect streets, shared tables, food, people, old bars and everyday Barcelona.
We used a modernist-inspired illustration style, a muted green palette and the panot as a symbol of arrival and putting down roots. In the project, the panot represented that first physical contact with the city: the thing you literally walk over while somewhere unfamiliar slowly turns into somewhere you know.
The green represented growth and new stages, but in a slow, organic way rather than a “NEW! LIMITED EDITION!” way.
Basically, we wanted less craft-beer launch energy and more “I swear this has always been here.”
But a neighbourhood beer probably needs a neighbourhood. The campaign couldn’t just talk about community and then put FER BARRI on a poster and call it a day.
So we started with a table.
A Moritz table would appear in different neighbourhoods of Barcelona as a place to sit, eat, talk and meet someone you didn’t necessarily arrive with.
Nothing revolutionary. Which was kind of why it worked.
Sometimes the activation is just giving people somewhere to sit.
Barri a Taula
Then we pushed the idea through food.
Barri a Taula paired one Catalan with one person from another nationality and asked them to cook together. Two backgrounds, one kitchen, and hopefully no argument over whose grandmother did it better.
The fusion dish became the idea in edible form: different origins, one shared table.
Different ingredients. Same table.
Leaving something behind
Campaigns love the word “community.” Sticking around is another story.
So the final phase became La Guia de Barri, a guide to small local businesses and neighbourhood institutions worth knowing, supporting and keeping visible.
Part guide, part local archive.
What I took from it
This project started with a beer tasting, which in retrospect was doing a suspicious amount of strategic work.
What made the concept click was the contradiction inside the product itself: Moritz feels deeply Barcelonian, yet its story begins with someone who came from somewhere else. The beer carried that same idea through ingredients and flavours that travel, adapt and become part of something local.
That gave us a much more interesting way to think about belonging.
Being local didn’t have to mean being born somewhere. It could also mean arriving, staying, contributing, learning the rhythms of a place and gradually becoming part of it.
Barri was never about teaching newcomers how to become “proper” locals.
It was about making room for the idea that a city can keep changing without losing what makes it itself.
Because maybe fer barri has less to do with where you came from, and more to do with what happens after you pull up a chair.
