Want to Sample an Awesome Beer? Do German!

One of the many things the German people are famous for is beer. With over thirteen-hundred different breweries spread across the country, beer is an essential piece of their culture and ancestry. The Czechs and the Irish are the only ones above the Germans with beer consumption per capita. The history of Germanic beer goes back to the origin of the nation when monks began to experiment with brewing around 1000 A.D. The nation's leaders eventually began to regulate the production of beer as brewing became more and more profitable. The most prominent and influential factor to influence Germanic brewing happened in fifteen-sixteen with the Bavarian Reinheitsgebot, or the purity standard.

The Bavarian Reinheitsgebot was authorized by Duke Wilhelm IV of Bavaria to help ensure Bavarian beers were made of high quality. Hops, barley, and water are the only ingredients that should go in in beer according to the standard. Unchanged after nearly five-hundred years, the Reinheitsgebot is the oldest regulation placed on drinks on the earth. Yeast is the only inclusion to the list of essential ingredients in the act. Yeast found naturally in the air was what manufacturers before used. Because of the stringent code of quality following the purity standard, Bavarian breweries were soon considered the best producers of beer. As the reputation of the Bavarian breweries spread across the nation more and more manufacturers started to adhere to the proclamation as well.

As a result of the Reinheitsgebot, Germanic brews have a long-standing notoriety of producing quality beers made from only the purest ingredients. As time passed and Germany began to ship out beer, many cities became famed brewing spots. By fifteen-hundred, Scandinavia, Holland, England, and even as far as India basically recieved their beer from one of the 600 breweries in the town of Bremen. Einbeck and Braunschweig were a couple of other famed brewing towns. In modern-day Germany, most of the country's drinking people still choose fabbier, or draught beer, over bottled beer because of it's hardy taste and right amount of head foam. In an effort to curtail further breakouts of the black plague German beer steins became popular around the time the purity standard came about and are still used today.

Germany made a lot of laws to stop its citizens from becoming sick during the era of the black plague. Large amounts of diseased flies would land in people's food and spread the infection. This led to the stein, a beverage container with a closed lid that is used with the thumb so somebody could stop disease and still be able to drink with one hand. As citizens started to realize the plague spread in dirty conditions with stagnant water, beer drinking rose exponentially. Steins were originally made of stoneware with pewter lids. As the pewter guild grew, steins began to be manufactured completely of pewter and remained that way for over three-hundred years. Still manufactured today, silver and porcelain steins were eventually introduced.

Today there are over thirteen-hundred and fifty breweries within Germany's borders that manufacture over 5000 kinds of beer. The Benedictine abbey Weihenstephan, which has been manufacturing beer since one-thousand and forty, is reported as the oldest brewery on the earth. The most concentrated area in Germany for breweries is the Franconia region of Bavaria by the city Bamberg. German breweries make a large variety of tastes and brands of beer with most of them able to be categorized under ales or lagers. Some brands of beer can have an alcoholic content as high as 12%, making them stronger than many wines even though the majority of beers have an alcoholic content ranging from 4.7% to 5.4%.