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Kitchen Table Kibitzing 4/30/25: Prost! [1]
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Date: 2025-04-30
I was supposed to post this last week but forgot to queue it. It smells OK so I’m serving it tonight. Fröhlichen Geburtstag zum Reinheitsgebot! The German beer purity law turned 509 last week.
The Reinheitsgebot (German pronunciation: [ˈʁaɪnhaɪtsɡəˌboːt] ⓘ; lit. 'purity order') is a series of regulations limiting the ingredients in beer in Germany and the states of the former Holy Roman Empire. The best known version of the law was adopted in Bavaria in 1516 (by William IV), but similar regulations predate the Bavarian order, and modern regulations also significantly differ from the 1516 Bavarian version. Although today the Reinheitsgebot is mentioned in various texts about the history of beer, historically it was only applied in the duchy, electorate, then Kingdom of Bavaria and from 1906 in Germany as a whole, and it had little or no effect in other countries or regions.
What did it mean?
On 23 April 1516, the co-rulers of Bavaria, the brothers Wilhelm and Ludwig Wittelsbach, issued the Reinheitsgebot, which they enforced across feudal Bavaria. (See box on page 38 for a translation.) It is interesting to note that only one sentence in the document actually describes how beer should be produced: “We especially wish that, from this point on and everywhere in the countryside as well as in the towns and marketplaces, nothing is to be added to or used in beer other than barley, hops and water.” The majority of this short document describes how beer could be distributed and sold. In fact, some historians question whether beer quality and consumer protection were the only motives for instituting the Reinheitsgebot and suggest that economic reasons may have also played a part. Several of these economic reasons include: The protection of barley farmers; the maintenance of reasonable prices to support beer consumption and provide a steady flow of tax revenues to royal coffers; and the omission of wheat as an ingredient to ensure that enough wheat was available to supply adequate amounts of bread to the people. Yet whatever factors originally influenced the Bavarian rulers to issue the Reinheitsgebot, it survives today because German brewers and consumers cherish it as a standard of quality and an assurance that their beer is an unadulterated product, without additives.
The law still stands because Germans take beer seriously.
All traditional German beers are brewed within the law. Some exceptions are made for regionally historic styles, though according to the Brauer-Bund, the German brewery association, these exceptions “merely prove the rule.” Such beers include the slightly sour Berliner Weisse and witbier from Thuringia that use orange peel and coriander seed. Marc-Oliver Huhnholz of the Brauer-Bund says that 89% of Germans are aware of the beer purity law, 85% support it and 79% deem it “worthy of protection” and “precious.” Huhnholz says that this “puts beer ahead of wine and even milk in Germans’ minds. The law may be old, but has lost none of it relevance.” “It stands for transparency, clarity and purity,” he says. “Artificial aromas, colorants, stabilizers, enzymes, emulsifiers or preservatives are not allowed. German brewers must master the art of brewing from four natural ingredients alone. This takes knowledge and skill.”
Nowadays you can get stuff made with Skittles, but real beer just has four ingredients. Paging Brett Kavanaugh.
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