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Want to Try a Great Beer? Drink German!

One of the various things the German people are famous for is beer. With more than 1300 different breweries spread across the country, beer is an essential part of their legacy and heritage. The Czechs and the Irish are the only ones above the Germans as far as beer drinking per capita. The history of Germanic brew spans back to the origin of the nation when monks started to experiment with brewing about one-thousand A.D. Eventually, brewing became really lucrative for the monks and the nation’s leaders began to legislate the manufacturing of the brew. The most well-known and significant component to effect German brewing happened in 1516 with the Bavarian Reinheitsgebot, or the purity requirement.

The Bavarian Reinheitsgebot was authorized by Duke Wilhelm IV of Bavaria to ensure that Bavarian beers were made of high quality. The standard states that beers should only be made of barley, hops, and water. Unchanged after nearly five-hundred years, the Reinheitsgebot is the oldest regulation placed on drinks on the earth. Yeast is the only extension to the list of crucial ingredients in the proclamation. Yeast that was naturally in the air was what manufacturers in the past used. Because of the stern code of quality followed by the purity requirement, Bavarian manufacturers were soon considered the best manufacturers of beer. As the prominence of the Bavarian breweries spread around the country more and more beer makers began to adhere to the proclamation as well.

German beers have a long-standing notoriety of making quality beers made only from the best ingredients as a result of the Reinheitsgebot. Some towns became famed brewing locations as time passed and Germany started to ship out beer. By fifteen-hundred, Scandinavia, Holland, England, and as far as India principally got their beer from one of the six-hundred breweries in the city of Bremen. Einbeck and Braunschweig were a couple of other famous brewing cities. In modern-day Germany, most of the country’s beer-drinking citizens still prefer fabbier, or draught beer, over bottle beer because of it’s hardy flavor and right amount of head foam. In use still today, German beer steins became popular around the time the purity standard came about in an effort to prevent further breakouts of the bubonic plague.

Germany enacted a lot of laws to prevent its people from becoming sick during the era of the bubonic plague. Massive amounts of infected flies would land in people’s food and spread the infection. This led to the stein, a drink container with a closed top that could be used with the thumb so a person could prevent disease and still be able to drink with one hand. As citizens began to realize the plague spread in dirty conditions with brackish water, beer consumption went up exponentially. German beer steins were originally crafted from stoneware with pewter lids. As the pewter guild grew, German beer steins started to be manufactured completely of pewter and stayed that way for over 300 years. Still manufactured today, silver and porcelain steins were eventually introduced.

Nowadays there are over 1350 breweries within Germany’s lands that make more than five-thousand types of beer. The Benedictine abbey Weihenstephan, which has been making beer since 1040, is considered the oldest brewery in the world. The most concentrated area in Germany for beer makers is the Franconia region of Bavaria by the city Bamberg. German breweries make a wide range of tastes and kinds of beer with the majority of them able to be placed under ales or lagers. Some kinds of beer can have an alcoholic content as high as 12%, making them more potent than a lot of wines even though most beers have an alcoholic content from 4.7% to 5.4%.

German beer has been famous for its great quality for centuries. Here are some facts about the traditions of the greatest beer brewers in the world.

Michael Usry is a top affiliate with beertaps.com, a website for beer tap handles and household draft beer accessories and a site that has authentic imported german beer steins.