The purity law

<< 2005-09-17 16:55 >>

One thing I found very interesting in Germany was the attitude to the famous German purity law for beer (or Reinheitsgebot in German). German beer is famous world-wide for quality, and for being made without additives, and a lot of this stems from the purity law. Germans take great pride in this law, but their relationship to it can be a little puzzling at times, and the law is not only positive.

The law has a long history, but it's generally the version of the law enacted in Bavaria in 1516 that's know as the purity law. This version states that the only allowed ingredients in beer are water, barley malts, and hops. The point of this was to ensure that brewers did not add cheaper, and poorer, ingredients to the beer to save money, thus screwing the consumers. You'll often find this described as "the oldest law in the world still in force", as many claim that this law is still followed in Germany today. So far, so good.

Purity law poster, from pub in Nürnberg

You'll find lots of German (and foreign) beer brewers stating proudly on posters, beer labels, web sites, etc that they brew according to "the purity law of 1516". The strange thing about this is that it's not true. Note that in the list of the three ingredients there is something missing. You're not allowed to add yeast! So, in fact, the only brewers in the world following the original purity law must be the lambic brewers, who get natural yeast bacteria from the air. Until yeast was discovered in 1800, this was the only known way to make beer ferment, so all the beer in the world before 1800 was really lambic.

In the Bavarian Brewing Museum in Kulmbach there was a section on the purity law, with the original text, and a translation into modern German. It then went on to say how important this was for German brewing, and how it guaranteed the quality of beer. Startlingly, the text did not comment on the fact that yeast was not on the list of ingredients, and nobody seemed to find this in the least puzzling. (Except me, that is. :-)

Not only do modern brewers sin against the law by using yeast; the weissbier brewers also use wheat malts, which are not allowed, either. And the few producers of roggenbier violate it by adding rye malts. Then there are the "dinkel" beers, which use spelt.

So, is the purity law all nonsense? Well, not really. It turns out that there is a modern version of the law, called the German Beer Tax Law. This has been updated to allow yeast, and for top-fermenting beers other cereal malts are allowed. So the brewers do indeed follow a purity law, they just don't follow the original from 1516.

And what about the quality of the beer? Well, here the record is more mixed. The law clearly does guarantee a kind of minimum quality, since practices common among big breweries all over the world, such as using maize, rice, sugar, and other cheap ingredients, are not allowed at all, and thus avoided. However, it doesn't allow spices, and it doesn't allow fruit. These two elements contribute to making Belgian beers so individualistic and interesting, and in Germany both are conspicuously missing, and to some extent I believe they contribute to making German beer more boring than it needs to be.

At the same time, the limitations on the ingredients have made German brewers come up with some interesting inventions in order to avoid getting too boring. Some examples of this are:

• Rauchbier, a specialty of the Bamberg area, where the malts are dried over beechwood fires, giving the beer a strong smoky flavour.
• Steinbier, which is brewed by using warm rocks to heat the wort, and the sugar-covered rocks are later also used in the fermentation.
• Maisel's Dampfbier, no longer made, was produced using steam in the brewing process, much like Anchor Steam.

Barley malts

Still, the purity law means that German brewers cannot produce a weissbier like Hoegaarden, because they are not allowed to add spices like orange peel and coriander. It's hard to see how that can be purely an advantage.

Another consequence of this is seen with Berliner Weisse, which is a special kind of weissbier produced with lactic bacteria as yeast (doesn't sound pure to me!), which gives it a quite sour flavour. It's very common to mix this with fruit syrup to get something quite like the cheaper Belgian fruit lambics, where fruit syrup is also used. However, with Berliner Weisse you must add the fruit syrup yourself, since for the brewer to do it would violate the purity law. That's not really a big deal, but it does mean that German brewers can't make a high-quality fruit Berliner Weisse by brewing it directly from fruit (as for example Cantillon does with their fruit lambics).

So, I guess, this is what happens when you try to use the law to guarantee the quality of beer. You get a certain minimum quality, but lose in other regards. The alternative, to rely on the market power of consumers to guarantee quality, seems to ensure that you get a market dominated by crap lagers below that minimum line. Except in Belgium, that is.

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