Welcome to The Session, a monthly event in which beer and brewing bloggers get together to all write about a chosen topic on the same day! This is Session #19, for which Lootcorp writer Jim has chosen the topic, “Deutsches Bier.”

It’s funny how old rules get thrown out of proportion and miscontextualized sometimes.

The German Reinheitsgebot, literally “Purity Law”, sets down, in its current form, that beer brewed in Germany must only be made of malt, water, hops, and yeast. When it was first written in 1516, however, the law stated that beer could only be made from barley, water, and hops. The differences between the classic Reinheitsgebot and the current German beer law shed light on some interesting quirks in human knowledge and thinking.

The most striking difference between the two versions of Purity Law is the lack of a provision for yeast in the old law. This is due to the fact that nobody in that time period knew that yeast existed. The conversion of wort into beer was generally attributed to the will of God until Louis Pasteur uncovered the role of yeast in fermentation in the 1800s. Many brewers had at least figured out that the sediment at the bottoms of their fermentation vessels could be put into other batches of beer to encourage fermentation, but they didn’t know why doing so worked.

If I may be permitted a brief editorial, as a devout Atheist, I am endlessly amused by how often the will of God turns out to just be germs. End of editorial.

More interesting than the addition of yeast, though, is the change in wording from “barley” in the classic law to “malt” in today’s law.

The original motivation for Reinheitsgebot was not a quest for higher-quality beer, but was instead a desire to curb shortages of more expensive wheat and rye, by requiring beer makers to use barley, in order to help bread makers. This purely economic concern is obviously not relevant today, and so current German beer law now allows all malt, regardless of what kind. Hefeweizen lovers should be thankful for that.

The rationale for German beer law today is that it leads to better beer. Indeed, brewers all over Germany proudly proclaim that this law is proof positive that Germans brew the best beer in the world. While we certainly cannot deny that there are many excellent German beers, one need only open a badly skunked bottle of thoroughly unexciting Beck’s to realize how absurd this assertion is.

More likely is the case that Germans cling to Reinheitsgebot simply for the sake of tradition. And who can blame them? I certainly would not begrudge anyone their national pride. But tradition does not make German beer good; Marvelously skilled German brewers are what make German beer good. And do please note that this only applies to the good beer. There is plenty of bad beer in Germany, I promise you.

That people around the world still defend an ancient and antiquated economic ordinance on the grounds that it is the reason for unrelated modern successes is symptomatic of the importance of tradition inherent to the human condition. It points to the power of belief at the expense of reason, the propensity for people to feel when they could instead think. It restrains progress and inhibits learning, endangering our development as a species. The fact that the problem of tradition affects something even as ultimately inessential as beer shows just how stubborn humans are capable of being.

Opinion, The Session 2 Comments »