The Reinheitsgebot of 1516: Seal of Quality, or Creativity Constraint?
~Setting the Stage~
I’ve been saying for years now that I’d post some of my material about the Reinheitsgebot (Beer Purity Law). Turns out it’s been one of the more difficult pieces of work to get across the finish line—not because I’ve had writer’s block on the subject, but because I’ve written quite a bit in draft form over the past four or five years. Since you probably don’t want to read upwards of 10,000 words on a smartphone (or even on a computer screen, for that matter), I’ve had to find ways to excerpt material from those essays without doing a disservice to the overarching argument. As anyone who spends any time writing knows, that’s not easy.
But today’s German Beer Day, so I decided to try to cobble something together. This first in what will become an occasional series on the Reinheitsgebot lays out some of the questions surrounding this oft-misunderstood prescription governing beer. It also presents critiques. Worth noting is that even if some of these critiques miss the mark, defenses put forward in support of the Reinheitsgebot sometimes rely on faulty assumptions as well.
What I haven’t (yet) done is answer the question of what the Reinheitsgebot is. I’ll save that for follow-up posts. In the meantime, pour yourselves a beer (preferably a German-style one) and enjoy!
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Where All German Beer Paths Converge
The Reinheitsgebot (Beer Purity Law) is the alpha and the omega of German beer. Debates about its relevance go to the heart of contemporary German beer culture, and have only heated up in light of craft beer’s arrival in Germany. Even if the Reinheitsgebot of 1516 is no longer the law of the land, its spirit lives on in legislation that limits beer ingredients to barley, hops, water, and yeast. It’s a prism from the distant past that refracts all discussions about the future of German beer.
German Critiques of the Reinheitsgebot
Proponents view the Reinheitsgebot not only as a seal of quality and a productive limitation that results in exacting beers, but as the very foundation of German beer culture. German critics of the Reinheitsgebot are often champions of craft beer, problematic as some advocates of craft see the term. Their critique revolves around the perception that the Reinheitsgebot is a constraint on creativity.
If some critics, such as Nina Anika Klotz, ultimately reject the notion that “craft” and the Reinheitsgebot are incompatible, others veer into hyperbole.[1] Martin Droschke and Norbert Krine present a reductionist debunking of ten myths about the Reinheitsgebot in their craft beer guide to Franconia. Günther Thömmes is strong on why the Reinheitsgebot might merit revision in the twenty-first century, but thin on the ground in terms of history, implying that nothing changed between 1516 and 1871 (which isn’t the case—I’ll have a follow-up article about that at some point).[2]
Critiques from Abroad
Critiques originating outside of Germany have been numerous over the years as well, but the foundation of these critiques often rests on a superficial understanding of the Reinheitsgebot and its history.[3] (This isn’t surprising given the dearth of scholarly work done on German beer history outside of Germany to date, especially in English-speaking countries.)[4] Laurent Mousson presents a list of occasionally tendentious facts in his attempt to slay sacred cows.[5] The title of Ron Pattinson’s “The Reinheitsgebot: Why it’s a load of old bollocks” speaks for itself.[6] And craft beer luminary Sam Calagione of Dogfish Head contends that the Reinheitsgebot is “nothing more than a relatively modern form of art censorship.”[7]
In Praise of Naturalness
Falling somewhere between the staunch defenders of the Reinheitsgebot and its detractors are people like Oliver Wesseloh, founder of Kehrwieder in Hamburg, and compelling interlocutor in the ongoing debates about the Reinheitsgebot’s relevance.[8] As a member of the Association of German Creative Brewers (which he co-founded), he and his colleagues have called for a relaxation of the rules to include any naturally occurring food product—a “natural ingredients law” to replace the “purity” law. This would open the door to any naturally occurring ingredient from fruits, vegetables, herbs and spices to coffee, chocolate, and vanilla. Neighbouring Austria’s Codex Alimentarius provides a framework for how this might look.
One of the Most Fascinating Aspects of German Beer History
All of this makes the “beer purity law” one of the most fascinating aspects of German beer history. Was the Reinheitsgebot the world’s first food law protecting drinkers from harmful ingredients? Or was it a means of restricting access to wheat? And if so, was it a matter of reserving wheat for bakers, especially in the event of poor harvests? Or was it a means of securing a ducal monopoly so that they could control the right to brew this beer seen as more “elegant” at the time? Or was it principally a fiscal law that determined a fair price for a particular measure of beer? These questions get at the heart of power relationships then and now.
Even without the historical intricacies and the rabbit holes, there’s still plenty to fuel debates in the Wirtshaus and beer garden, especially when it comes to how various stakeholders have interpreted the significance of these regulations over the decades. Is the Reinheitsgebot central to our understanding of what German beer is, or is it a relic of the past best tossed in the proverbial dustbin of history? Is it a guarantor of beer quality, a brake on creativity, or a marketing ploy that big breweries use as a fig leaf to cover for mediocre beer?
On the Horizon
I’ll leave it at that for today. Next up: What is the Reinheitsgebot, anyway? Spoiler alert: The spirit of the Reinheitsgebot is about quality, and has been since the brewing ordinances that predated it. The notion of purity (Reinheit) took on a belated importance in light of the centuries-long battle against the adulteration of beer. In fact, the word “Reinheitsgebot” was only mentioned for the first time in print in 1909, and uttered in public for the first time by Johann Baptiste Rauch during a Bavarian Landtag session in 1918. What we now call the Reinheitsgebot became a component of German cultural identity only in the postwar period.
Related Posts
The Munich Baker-Brewer Dispute: Yeast and the Emergence of Lager
Gruit: Herbs, Spice, and Everything Nice
Where Did All the Märzen Go? Provisioning Oktoberfest Imbibers over the Centuries
In the Cool Shade of the Beer Garden
Endnotes
[1] See Nina Anika Klotz, “Was ist eigentlich das Reinheitsgebot?” Hopfen Helden (undated; ca. 2016-2017). Nils Klawitter, “The Twilight of Germany’s RHGB.” Spiegel Online (21 April 2016), also presents a nuanced critique.
[2] See Martin Droschke and Norbert Krine, Craft Beer Führer Franken (Cadolzburg, 2016), 230-235. See also Günther Thömmes, “Das deutsche bzw. bayrische Reinheitsgebot für Bier,” Neubierig (7 July 2013).
[3] For just a smattering of journalistic articles on the Reinheitsgebot, see: Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson, “Is a 500-Year-Old German Beer Law Heritage Worth Honoring?” NPR: The Salt (December 18, 2013); Christian de Benedetti, “Brauereisterben: Germany’s Beer Culture is in Decline,” Slate (March 2, 2011); and Kate Connolly, “Medieval Beer Purity Law Has Germany’s Craft Brewers Over a Barrel.” The Guardian (18 April 2016).
[4] Though the scholarly body of English-language work on lager and its proliferation is growing, scholarly work on the Reinheitsgebot itself lags behind. One rare exception is Robert Shea Terrell, “Entanglements of Scale: The Beer Purity Law from Bavarian Oddity to German Icon, 1906-1975,” Contemporary European History 33 (2024), 748-762. To date I’ve only skimmed the work. Its central contentions overlap with Birgit Speckle’s work on beer and identity in her Streit ums Bier in Bayern: Wertvorstellungen um Reinheit, Gemeinschaft und Tradition (München: Waxmann, 2001).
[5] Laurent Mousson, “Reinheitsgebot: Die Fakten in 10 Punkten/Les faits, en 10 points,” Bov Beers (2 April 2016). As for what I’m calling tendentious facts, in one of his ten points Mousson claims that the Reinheitsgebot was dusted off in the 1860s to press Bavarian protectionist interests on the eve of Germany’s unification. As I’ll demonstrate in a subsequent article, this is only partially true. The spread of Bavaria’s brewing regulations to all of Germany by 1906 had less to do with protectionism than it did with practical considerations. In brief: consumers outside of Bavaria had developed a taste for Bavarian beer. Due to its reputation for quality, many brewers in northern Germany advocated for the adoption of these regulations that fostered quality by guaranteeing “purity.” Regarding Mousson’s contention that no beer has ever been brewed according to the strictures of 1516 because it didn’t mention yeast (the contention here being that brewers didn’t know about yeast in 1516), we know that wasn’t the case. For more, see “The Munich Baker-Brewer Dispute: Yeast and the Emergence of Lager.”
[6] Ron Pattinson, “The Reinheitsgebot: Why it’s a load of old bollocks,” European Beer Guide.
[7] Sam Calagione, Foreword to Stan Hieronymus’s Brewing Local: American-Grown Beer (Boulder, 2016).
[8] Oliver Wesseloh, Bier Leben: Die neue Braukultur (Reinbeck bei Hamburg: Rowohlt Taschenbuch Verlag, 2015).
All photos by Franz D. Hofer
© 2025 Franz D. Hofer and A Tempest in a Tankard. All rights reserved.
Great, great article, Franz!!! I look forward to its future installments.
Thanks so much, Irving! Might take me a while to get them out the door, but there will be more. Prost!
Robert Shea Terrell also published his PhD on Beer and the Making of the German Nation: https://academic.oup.com/book/55298?login=false
Greetings from someone currently writing his MA thesis on the Rheinheitsgebot (my main thrust being that it’s an invented tradition in the 20th century, but a fascinating convoluted legal history found in the Reichstagsdebatten of the late 19th century, and it seems that the first mention of the Reinheitsgebot predates even 1909, I can get back to you on the sources)
To me personally the Rheinheitsgebot is a reaction to German beer being a victim of it’s own success: If everyone is brewing lager, what, exactly, makes German beer unique. Well, we’ve got this law, let’s dredge up it’s supposed lineage and give it a historic sheen. Ultimately the Rheinheitsgebot in my eyes is the capstone of the “defeat” of top-fermenting German beer styles, which were already commercially irrelevant in 1906, relative to lager beers.
Hi Eric,
First off, apologies for the belated response to your comment. It somehow fell through the cracks of a busy fall semester in Vienna. I came across your comment again when I was posting the second installment of my Reinheitsgebot series.
That’s great that you’re doing an MA on the Reinheitsgebot! By now you’re probably much further along then you were in September 2025. I’m looking forward to reading your thesis when it’s done! I think you’re bang-on in approaching the RHGB as an “invented tradition” of the twentieth century, specifically the term itself and its freighted meaning (nicht Gesetz, sondern Gebot, which immediately sacralizes the RGHB). I’m assuming you’ve already read Birgit Speckle’s Streit ums Bier in Bayern: Wertvorstellungen um Reinheit, Gemeinschaft und Tradition? She takes up those themes as well.
I’m not yet familiar with the Reichstag debates of the late nineteenth century, having so far confined myself mainly to whatever I can find within Bavaria. I’ve only looked at a few documents on the federal level, and those were in the early 1900s, including the source which contains the first written reference to the RHGB, which you mention above: Verhandlungen des Reichtags. Anlagen zu den Stenographischen Berichten. 10. Bericht der Kommission für Petitionen, 25 Mai 1909. Band 275. So I’m really looking forward to reading about those 19th-C Reichstag debates! (If you don’t mind, send me some of your primary doc references. I’d love to give them a read at some point.)
For what it’s worth, though the RHGB may well be an “invented tradition” à la Hobsbawm and Ranger, it’s not one that was invented out of thin air. And I don’t see it as a kind of “conquest and defeat” narrative that many other (usually non-academic) commentators are pedaling. (I’ll have a post out at some point that addresses this notion that the RHGB was “foisted” upon the rest of Germany during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. I think you’re right in recognizing that some of the historical northern German styles we love today, along with some that are now extinct, were no longer commercially relevant or viable by 1906.)
Terrell is one of the exceptions to the non-academic commentators who see the RHGB in terms of tropes of conquest and defeat, but I think he’s writing under the influence of non-academic commentators, a not insignificant number of whom are either non-German, and if they are German, they’re usually not scholars. Rather, they tend to be brewers or beer writers who are proponents of Kreativbier, and who see the RHGB as an impediment to “craft.” In this sense, I think it’s important to be aware of a particular commentator’s subject position and emotional investments. So far, I’ve found that German scholars who deal with the RHGB tend to be more nuanced, regardless of whether they’re ultimately “for” or “against” the RHGB.
At any rate, keep in touch! I’d love to continue the conversation, maybe over a beer someday in Berlin, Munich, or Vienna.
Einen hab ich noch: One of the biggest mysteries/badly sourced arguments I’ve seen is that Bavaria made it’s entry into the German Reich dependent on the widespread adoption of the Reinheitsgebot. But… which Reich is it? The one in 1871 or 1919? (The Weimar Republic was still the German Reich officially, it’s just called that for historical convenience). I am still searching for a good source that proves/disproves this claim.
I don’t have primary sources at my fingertips at the moment for 1919, but this isn’t as far-fetched as it may seem. On the eve of WWI, beer revenues made up 36% of the Bavarian coffers. Ultimately, I’m not so sure Bavaria would have refused accession to the Weimar Republic on beer alone, but the protection of its beer industry (and, by extension, the struggle over what constituted beer) was front-and-center.
As for which German Reich, the one in 1871, or the one in 1919? Both. Here’s a paragraph from something I haven’t posted on the blog or published anywhere yet:
“Bavarian beer laws hung in the balance when Germany unified under Bismarck in 1871, surviving only to the extent that Bavaria was able to obtain a provision for its malt tax in the German Empire’s constitution. The Beer Tax Act (Biersteuergesetz) of 1872 was the first Germany-wide beer law, but Bavaria’s beer prerogatives didn’t yet apply to all of Germany. Instead, Bavarian beer law (and its protectionist measures directed at non-compliant beer from outside of Bavaria) remained valid in Bavaria, and was guaranteed by the imperial constitution.”
Since the footnotes probably won’t carry over to this WordPress comment, here’s the relevant primary source reference:
Reichsgesetzblatt (1872), 153 (cited in Heinrich Zapf and Erich Siegert, Das Biersteuergesetz vom 9. Juli 1923/11. August 1923/13. Februar 1924 [Berlin and Munich, 1925]).
Prost!