The German beer purity law no doubt made a lot of sense five centuries ago, but IMHO doesn’t make sense to enforce it in 2016. Sure, it helped create a distinctive (and rather uniform) style of beer for which Germany is famous for, but the country is now decades behind the rest of the world in the craft brew revolution. Talk about suppressing a country’s creative impulses.
You can make whatever kind of grain-based brewed beverage you like in Germany, you just can’t call it bier (Source - my German SCA pals who make gruit-based ales). I don’t see how this suppresses any creativity in making drinks, it just encourages creativity in marketing them.
:shrug: My Wife and I spent 3 weeks in Bavaria a few years ago. The beer was just outstanding. Don’t know how to put it, but it seemed so fresh. Actually turned my wife into a beer drinker.
I also thought the lines on the glasses to show what a full pour is, was kinda cute.
Never been to Germany but in London last month I thought it was much more honest that the wine was sold by the milliliter (125, 250, etc.) instead of a nebulous “glass”. You never know in America if you’re going to get 1/5th or 1/3 a bottle.
A nice idea in theory but in practice when businesses are deregulated they usually put their creative impulses into figuring out ways to market inferior products.
Well, in practice, in the US, when the beer industry was deregulated (yes, I realize that’s a simplification) it started the craft beer boom. So, YMMV.
In a bierstube in Dusseldorf, I was eddicated that if you emptied your glass, you’d get a replacement, but if you left enough beer to reach the bottom of the pub’s shield (maybe an ounce?), it signaled you were done or not ready for another one.
There was also an amusing tradition/scam/act in which the (very grouchy) waiter would stand and look at everyone at the table for a moment, then slam down a glass himself from the tray and mark it on someone’s coaster. Built in tip system, I guess. Had we been a table of tourists, I would have wondered, but we three were guests of a half-dozen locals.
Gooooood bier.
I’m not sure that the German law is really restricting anything. You shouldn’t be putting all that extra crap into beer. If you want your beer to taste like orange peel - and I sure as hell don’t - go find a variety of hops that will give you the right flavor. I would have to check labels to see which of my favorite craft beers fit the German rules and which don’t, but you can make an enormous variety of beers just by changing the type of hops and the roast of the barley.
I find this thread amusing because William Busch (yes, a member of THAT family) is a craft brewer who proudly boasts of his strict adherence to Reinheitsgebot.
And, by the way, “reinheitsgebot” is perfect for a drinking song.
I’m not sure in what way you think German beer is uniform? Sure, something as insipid as Bud can’t be labeled as “Bier”, but I don’t know how you think a Hefeweisen is anything like a Rauch? To a lesser extent, there is a world of difference between helles lagers and dunkels.
The Rheinheitsgebot dates from a time when food safety and purity where laughable. It prevented brewers from putting any old fermentable garbage like potatoes peelings and turnip tops in their beer, and flavoring with any questionable herb like wormwood. Not necessarily as relevant today, but makes for damn good traditional beers.
Remember Samuel Adams? Their whole pitch for years and years when they first started was that they were the only American beer complient with Rheinheitsgebot. They have dropped that these days but it was a big claim to fame for their first decade or more…
ISTR reading that the Reinheitsgebot is more of a widely followed guideline, rather than a hard and fast law these days, now that the EU regulations trump German law.
That said, the German brewers have long since figured out how to stay barely within the letter of the law, while doing all the same stuff that foreign brewers do, with the exception of using adjuncts. For example, they make malt-based colorings, ferment malt to vary the pH of the mash, use barely malted “chit malt”, and other dodges that are within the letter of the law, if not the spirit of the law.
Most US craft beers probably would be ok under the Reinheitsgebot anyway; all it really specifies is that beer has 4 ingredients- barley, water, hops and yeast. Stuff like fruit beers, adjunct lagers and strange grains. And I’ve never been very clear at all on how wheat beers fall under the Reinheitsgebot anyway- I’ve read that beers employing anything other than barley have to be top-fermented and can also use sugar, which would make most craft brews compliant, as well as most British Real ales as well.
In short, it’s not the laws holding German beer back, it’s the tastes of the German population. They like their lagers, altbiers, kolsches, Weisses and Weizens, and aren’t so fond of US-style ales.
Craft beer doesn’t represent the American beer industry. What represents the American beer industry is Bud Lite.
At the famous medieval walled city of Rothenburg ob der Tauber there is a Kriminalmuseum where one can see an actual Iron Maiden and other archaic oddities, what I noticed there were numerous punishments and specific penalties, quite severe, for selling things like adulterated bread and underweight this and phony that. They did seem to have it out for unscrupulous bakers, a little sawdust in der bröt would get one put in a dunker, a sort of contraption designed to drown, or near enough.
In that context a bier purity law at the time seems reasonable, bier is simply liquid bread when it isn’t some watered down industrial swill atrocity.
While there was a Reinheitsgebot decreed in 1516, it isn’t really in force anymore, and hasn’t been for a long time, at least not in its original form; and in fact, it also has older precursors, such as the Braugebot of 1319, specifying the same ingredients. Already in 1551, new laws allowed the addition of cilantro and laurel; also, some places were awarded the right to use wheat in their beers, instead of barley.
The reason the law is cited these days is mainly marketing and protection of the national economy: especially in the 50s and 60s, lots of imported beers threatened German brewers, who then appealed to the ‘tradition’ of the Reinheitsgebot, branding imported beers ‘chemical beers’ (‘Chemiebiere’), and fighting (ultimately unsuccessfully) their import under the name ‘beer’ (that is, of course, Bier).
That said, what can be called ‘beer’ in Germany today is regulated by the ‘vorläufige Bierverordnung’ (preliminary beer ordinance) of 1993, which, for bottom-fermented beer, indeed decrees the use of barley malt, hops, yeast, and water, while allowing some additions for top-fermented beer, such as various sugars and sugar-based colorings, and also the use of different malts.
All in all, I don’t think the Reinheitsgebot is necessarily a bad thing: often, constraints help to spur creativity, and there’s a lot of variation that can be produced just by modifying the many variables of the brewing process; variations that otherwise might not exist. Furthermore, many, if not most, craft beers actually conform to the Reinheitsgebot; and if I’m in the mood for something different, I can always just grab a fruit lambic or a gose.
What I really want to know is why all these master American brewers can’t produce something that compares to even a mediocre German (Chech style) pilsener. Seriously, it’s only 4 ingredients. It can’t be that difficult.
They can and do. But the lumpenproletariat wants swill, so that’s what gets churned out by the industrial brewers. Who are bloody good at their craft, mind you! A little fuckup at the local brewpub and what you get is a not-that-popular “Guest” tap for a week. Fuckup a little at Budweiser and the whole world notices and stock prices plummet, along with your employment future.
I don’t doubt that Anheuser-Busch could make something very similar to just about any beer you can name, especially as far as lagers go.
But that’s not what sells. Even beers like Budweiser started out as “Classic American Pilsners”, which were essentially European style pilsners, brewed with American ingredients, which typically means 6 row barley, some proportion of adjuncts to lighten the body and reduce haze, and native hops like Cluster. So basically something like Budweiser on steroids.
But over time, they realized that every time they’ve lowered the hops and/or maltiness, their sales have either stayed the same or gone up, so as a result, today’s beer is a pale shadow of what the American pilsners of our great-great-grandfathers’ day were.
Not to blame our distaff members, but there is also the theory that women contributed to the wussification of American lager in the post-war years. Couples on a limited budget would buy a pitcher, and either water it down or buy the wateriest beer available since the women-folk didn’t like the body/hops of what was out there. Since women do most of the shopping, they bought the beers they liked. This eventually led to Abominations Unto Nuggan like Bud Light.
I don’t necessarily buy this theory, but the idea is out there. Personally, I think it’s just a result of corporatization and the drive for greater and greater profits at the expense of taste and character. that and the use of titties to sell beer.