Anyone know if brewing chemistry to adjust RO water is allowed under the Reinheitsgebot. I'm assuming back in the day they didn't even know about water Chem but now days the breweries still following it are they adjusting water Chem at all?
Reinheitsgebot and salts
- Thread starter Izzie1701
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They can boil the water to decarbonate it, and I assume they could add slaked lime because it all precipitates out eventually. Anything more is probably verboten. Acid malt should be okay too.
Anything done to the water outside the brewhouse is allowed. No mineral or acid (liquid or solid) additions in the brewhouse.
Do any German breweries not follow Reinheitsgebot and make some kind of malt beverage instead of bier? (what anyone else would call beer, but with adjuncts, etc) Do they import beer from other less strict EU countries, like Belgium? Just curious how they deal with that.
motosapiens
Well-Known Member
Not sure why you would want to make crap beer, but when I lived there, I didn't observe any. As I recall, all the imported beer from holland (which no one but tourists drank) also had to conform to the RHGB. But that was 1985-91, so things may have changed now.
As far as I understand you don't have to follow it anymore. Just most breweries do because the locals won't drink anything but. I don't think you have all your beer dumped and get fined anymore if you don't follow it. It was put in place to reduce food prices by keeping Brewers from using wheat which was required for bread. As far as I know the law is just a guide line now not still a law.
I believe beer made for export is not subject to reinheitsgebot restrictions. I think that ales can use malted grains besides barley.
tgolanos
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Most German breweries don't care about Rgebot.
motosapiens
Well-Known Member
If that is true, that is a pretty recent development. When I was there in the 80's, the majority of beer labels highlighted that they were brewed in accordance with the RHGB.
I was down in austria with some german bike-racing buddies for the Oetztaler bike marathon and we had dinner at a gasthaus the night before. When discussing the beer options, they totally ignored the austrian ones, explaining to me that 'in oesterreich gibt's kein Reinheitsgebot'. So we ordered german imports. Fortunately german imports are easy to find throughout europe, probably due to the large numbers of nationalistic german tourists.
Considering that it's still a law in Germany, I think they still care quite a bit about it.
Fun reads:
http://reinheitsgebot.de/en/home/the-reinheitsgebot/
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2...ebot-beer-purity-law-klosterbrauerei-neuzelle
http://allaboutbeer.com/article/happy-birthday-reinheitsgebot/
The Reinheitsgebot getting applied outside of Bavaria is probably the worst thing that's ever happened to German brewing. It did terrible things to traditional north German brewing which, much like Belgian beer, traditionally used a lot of adjuncts.
itsbarleytime
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Soft water for light beer, I have used acidulated malt, but I like it better without.
JordanKnudson
Well-Known Member
Yeah, all those crappy witbiers and lambics and milk stouts and fruit beers and farmhouse ales and cream ales...Belgians with all that sugar...not to mention all the fun grapefruit ipas, bourbon vanilla porters, coffee stouts/porters/browns, etc... man, what a bunch of crap beers! Hurr-dee-durr!
