By Ines Keane
Start with what is missing. The famous law named three ingredients, and yeast was not among them.
The decree
An Ohio State University history site says the 1516 decree was issued by Dukes Wilhelm IV and Ludwig X in Ingolstadt, Bavaria, and limited beer ingredients to barley, hops and water. A beer blog gives the date as 23 April 1516 and also names the brothers. Wikipedia gives the same date and names only Duke Wilhelm IV. A Library of Congress law blog says the dukes decreed the ordinance at a meeting of the Estates of Bavaria in 1516, and quotes the rule: nothing but barley, hops and water shall be used to brew beer. The blog says violators faced having the beer barrels removed from their possession.
Why it was written
The Ohio State site says the purpose was to standardise the price of beer per Maß, a Bavarian litre, and to reduce competition for grain, because wheat beer was driving up the cost of bread grain. Wikipedia says the decree set seasonal prices from one to two Pfennig per Maß. An Associated Press article carried on a trade-news site says the law allowed only barley because wheat was “too valuable as food.” Our reading is that the first concern was food and price, not what happened inside the cup.
What came before
Wikipedia lists earlier beer rules in German towns: Nuremberg in 1293, Erfurt in 1351 and Weißensee in 1434. The Ohio State site says Munich had beer quality ordinances dating back to 1363. Wikipedia adds that a Munich law of 1487 applied before the 1516 decree spread the idea across Bavaria. The beer blog gives the same three dates for Nuremberg, Erfurt and Weißensee, and calls the last a direct precursor.
The wheat exception
The ban on wheat did not last for everyone. The Ohio State site says the Duke of Wittelsbach kept one brewery, at Schwarnach, for exclusive Weissbier. The beer blog says a wheat-beer exception was granted to the Degenberg family soon after 1516 and was later extended. These are two different accounts of who held the exception, and we give both.
What about yeast?
Wikipedia says yeast was not mentioned in 1516 even though it was used. The Ohio State site says yeast and fermentation were not understood until Louis Pasteur’s work in the 1850s, while brewers’ guilds had preserved yeast methods since the 1400s. The Library of Congress blog says yeast was officially added to the permitted list in 1906, when the rule was applied across the German Empire, and says the 1906 Act drew a line between bottom-fermented beers, which had stricter rules, and top-fermented ones. Wikipedia says 1906 was when the law applied consistently across Germany, and that a revised Vorläufiges Biergesetz in 1993 updated the permitted ingredients to include yeast and malted wheat and rye. So yeast enters the law in 1906 (Library of Congress) or 1993 (Wikipedia). We do not choose.
The name and the spread
The Ohio State site says the rule was first called the Surrogateverbot, a ban on substitutes, and was renamed Reinheitsgebot in 1918 by a Bavarian parliament member. It says the rule was folded into the tax code of unified Germany in 1871. Wikipedia says that in 1952 it was written into the West German Biersteuergesetz and that Norway adopted similar legislation in 1912. It also says a vote of Bavarian brewers in 2015 approved revisions allowing additional natural ingredients.
Challenges
The Ohio State site says the EU struck the law down as a trade barrier in 1987, and that it applied only to imports. The beer blog dates a European Court of Justice ruling to the same year, saying it stopped Germany from banning foreign beers that did not comply. The Ohio State site also says East Germany did not enforce the law between 1949 and 1989. The AP article describes a long fight over a Brandenburg monastery brewery that added sugar to a black beer. It says the dispute lasted a decade and ended when Germany’s highest administrative court approved the product in 2005. The same article carries a critic’s view that the Reinheitsgebot was little more than a marketing trick of the early 20th century, meant to promote German beer against foreign rivals. That is one opinion, and we quote it as one.
The numbers today
A National Geographic travel piece says Germany has more than 1,300 breweries, half of them microbreweries, more than 200 hop varieties and “as many strains of yeast,” and that imports are under 10 per cent of the market. It says the law was formally repealed in the early 1990s. Wikipedia says the Vorläufiges Biergesetz was revised in 1993. We give both and note the wording differs. The AP article says annual beer consumption per head fell from 141 litres in 1991 to 98 litres in the year before it ran, a drop of about 30 per cent. A beer blog says a survey found about 85 per cent of Germans support the law. We have not seen the survey itself.
The anniversary
The Ohio State site says the 500th anniversary was marked in 2016, and that a petition to the UNESCO World Heritage List was filed in 2013. We have not checked what happened to the petition.
What it means for a trip
Our reading is that the label is the useful part. The sources show a rule that began as a price and bread measure and later turned into a mark of quality. They disagree on how much of the story is myth. If a menu or label mentions the law, it is worth asking what ingredients the maker uses. We have not checked any brewer.
Roam first. Shop later.