German Purity laws

At some point in your beer drinking career you will bump into someone who espouses the German purity laws. These were introduced in Germany in  the 16th Century in an attempt to limit the ingredients used in brewing beer to barley, hops and water (interestingly no mention of yeast as this hadn't been identified as a specific ingredient at the time - fermentation just happened, and no-one was sure why). General opinion says that this was done to prevent the use of wheat and rye by brewers, which was in turn driving up the price of bread. There is also a conspiracist angle to this - prior to the act brewers often used preservative / bittering agents such as bog myrtle, yarrow and wormwood. These could add a euphoric and even psychoactive element to the beer, and there is a theory that by removing these and replacing them with a soporific (hops) the population would be easier to control.

Whatever the reasons, the rules spread quickly across Germany and helped in the development of the classic German Pilsner - fresh, clean, light and of course pure. Nothing wrong with that, but it's only one type of beer. This doesn't stop the beer bore from lecturing you on what 'should' be in a beer. The conversation will often go as so:-

Them: Of course beer should only be made from four ingredients - malt, water, hops and yeast

You: hmm, that's not strictly right. They're only German purity laws*, they don't apply to all beers

Them: you're wrong. Only those 4 ingredients.

You: Only if you're making German pilsner. Beer comes from an old English word for barley, but there are recipes for beer stretching back to 2000BC. Hops only started being used in the 9th Century and didn't really take off for a few hundred years after that, so it's a fairly modern restriction.

Them: no, you can only use 4 ingredients

You: no, you can add other things in the boil. It's called an adjunct. A usual one is sugar, you can use that to increase the strength of a beer without making it too malty. You can also add herns & spices, other grains, flavourings and even fruit to get the taste you're after.

Them: then it's not beer because it's not made from 4 ingredients.
 
You: No, it just explains why German beer is so uniform & boring**. I'm off for a pint. See ya.
 

The other good thing about Pilsner is it is brewed using a lager yeast. This sits at the bottom of the fermentor (as opposed to ale yeast which sits at the top) and more importantly is also active in cooler conditions. Perfect for an unheated garage. So today I'm brewing up a 'Punchy Pilsner'

 

3kg Pilsner malt

3kg Pale malt extract

100g Saaz (50g @ 60mins, 50g @ 15mins)

50g Hallertau (@ 5mins)

Saflager S-23 yeast

 

Because lagers are very clean tasting it's apparently a lot tricker to make a good one.It's my first so we'll see how it turns out. Whatever the taste it should have some kick to it......

Mmmm - a bubbling pot of purity

* When writing this I found out that the purity laws have been replaced by the Provisional German Beer Law,which allows constituent components prohibited in the Reinheitsgebot, such as yeast, wheat malt and cane sugar! So it looks like reality is a little more complex than what you can read from the back of a Becks bottle.

**This is actually unfair - German beer is very varied and interesting. And the majority of ales are also brewed with not much more than those four ingredients - the varieties of hops, the differing roasts of malts and the multitude of yeasts give you a very wide range of brews to produce from the palest and cleanest of lagers to be darkest of stouts or the fruitiest of saisons. But the shocked pause will give you time to make a hasty retreat to the bar.