Itching to Taste a Fabulous Beer? Do German!

One of the many things the Germans are renowned for is beer. Beer is a crucial part of their legacy and ancestry, with over 1300 different breweries spread across the country. As far as per person beer drinking, the Germans are only behind the Czechs and the Irish. The monks started to experiment with brewing about one-thousand A.D. back in the beginning of German history The nation's leaders eventually began to regulate the production of beer as brewing started to be more and more lucrative. The Bavarian Reinheitsgebot, or purity requirement, was enacted in fifteen-sixteen and is still the most well-known and influential factor to effect Germanic brewing.



The Bavarian Reinheitsgebot was authorized by Duke Wilhelm IV of Bavaria to help guarantee that Bavarian beers were made of the highest quality. The document says that beers must only be made of water, hops, and barley. Unchanged after almost five-hundred years, the Reinheitsgebot is the oldest regulation put on food on the earth. Yeast is the only addition to the list of essential ingredients in the proclamation. Yeast that was naturally in the air was what manufacturers in the past used. Because of the stern standard of quality following the purity requirement, Bavarian manufacturers were soon considered the best producers of beer. As the reputation of the Bavarian breweries spread across the country more and more producers started to follow the act also.



German beers have a long-standing position of producing quality beers made only from the best ingredients as a result of the Reinheitsgebot. As time went on and Germany started to export beer, some cities became famous brewing spots. The city of Bremen had over 600 breweries in it by 1500 and was the top exporter of beer to Holland, Scandinavia, England, and as far as India. Einbeck and Braunschweig were a couple of other famous brewing cities. In modern-day Germany, most of the country's beer-drinking people still choose fabbier, or draft beer, over bottled beer because of it's hardy taste and right amount of foam. In an attempt to prevent more outbreaks of the bubonic plague German beer steins became popular around the time the purity standard came about and are still in use today.



Germany enacted many laws to stop its people from getting ill during the time of the bubonic plague. Infection would spread as large amounts of diseased flies flew in citizen's food and beverages. This led to the German beer stein, a beverage vessel with a closed lid that could be used with the thumb so somebody could stop disease and still be able to drink with their free hand. As people started to learn the plague spread in unsanitary conditions with stale water, beer consumption rose exponentially. Originally made of stoneware with pewter tops, steins grew in popularity. As the pewter guild became more powerful, German beer steins began to be made completely of pewter and stayed that way for over 300 years. Still produced today, silver and porcelain steins were eventually introduced.



More than five-thousand types of beer are made today from over thirteen-hundred and fifty breweries within Germany's borders. The Benedictine abbey Weihenstephan, which has been manufacturing beer since one-thousand and forty, is reported as the oldest brewery in the world. The Franconia region of Bavaria near the city Bamberg is the most concentrated area for breweries in Germany. German beer makers make a wide range of tastes and brands of beer with most of them able to be placed under ales or lagers. Some brands of beer can have an alcoholic content as high as 12%, making them stronger than most wines even though the majority of beers have an alcoholic content ranging from 4.7% to 5.4%.