What is the Reinheitsgebot?
German Beer Steins
Germany’s 500-Year-Old Beer Purity law
Three Ingredients, One Duke
On April 23, 1516, Duke Wilhelm IV of Bavaria issued a decree in the town of Ingolstadt: beer could be made from only three ingredients — water, barley, and hops. (Yeast wasn't on the list because its role wasn't understood — brewers transferred it from batch to batch and saw it as part of the process rather than an ingredient. Once science caught up with fermentation in the 19th century, yeast was officially added as the fourth permitted ingredient.)
The Duke's motives were practical as much as pure. Bread was the staple food of the common people, and brewers competing for wheat and rye drove grain prices up. Restricting beer to barley protected the bread supply. The law also stamped out some genuinely alarming practices — medieval brewers had been known to toss in soot, ox bile, and even poisonous plants like henbane to imitate the effects of stronger beer.
Why It Still Matters in Your Glass
Critics sometimes call the Reinheitsgebot limiting — no fruit, no spices, no shortcuts. But German brewers turned constraint into craft. When you can only use four ingredients, mastery of those ingredients becomes everything: the mineral character of the water, the malting of the barley, the variety of the hops, the behavior of the yeast. The astonishing range of German beer styles — crisp Pilsner, bready Helles, roasty Dunkel, banana-and-clove Hefeweizen (wheat beers got their own carve-out) — all comes from endless refinement within those boundaries.
It's the same philosophy behind great German cooking: simple ingredients, treated with respect, executed without compromise.
Modern Law
Reinheitsgebot is not a legal requirement for all beers sold in Germany, as of 1987 a EU ruling forced Germany to allow imported beers. In 1993, it was officially replaced by the Provisional German Beer Law as a temporary measure and again was replaced in 2005 by Bierverordnung, which allows for more ingredients in beers and put Germany in compliance with the EU industry standards for food and beverages.
Taste the Law in Action
Our ten German taps at Old Stein Inn pour beers brewed in that tradition, and our full list of bottled beers reads like a tour of German brewing history. Ask your server or bartender what's pouring — there's a good chance the recipe in your glass would have satisfied a Bavarian duke five centuries ago.
Come explore the taps at our 22-foot bar, or grab a liter in the biergarten. Prost!