Ah, looks so good, right?

Look again:

I found this favorite one of my beers on a list of Eight Beers You Should Stop Drinking Immediately. That was disconcerting.

While I read this article, I remembered that Germany has a “Reinheitsgebot” or “German Beer Purity Law” that was first enacted on November 30, 1487. It required that the only ingredients of beer were water, barley and hops. German breweries are very proud of their purity laws and standards to this day, even though there were some minor adjustments over the years. For instance, to accommodate wheat beers.

However, you can be pretty sure that you won’t have to worry about fish bladder or high fructose corn syrup in German beer.

A funny thing is – the Reinheitsgebot also set the price of one Maß (which is one liter as seen in the mugs below) at 1-2 Pfennig (which is about a penny). Surely, they didn’t adhere to that. A Maß cost between 8,30 € and 8,60 € at the Oktoberfest last year.

Zum Wohl!