What is the Reinheitsgebot?

The 1516 decree

On 23 April 1516 in Ingolstadt, Dukes Wilhelm IV and Ludwig X of Bavaria issued an ordinance stating that beer could contain only barley, hops and water. Yeast is absent because its role in fermentation was not understood until Louis Pasteur's work in the 1850s and 1860s. The text drew on earlier local rules, notably a 1487 Munich ordinance by Duke Albrecht IV.

The decree was as much about prices and grain as about purity. It fixed the price of beer at one pfennig per Maß between Michaelmas and St George's Day and two pfennig in summer. Reserving wheat and rye for bakers helped keep bread affordable. Banning other additives also excluded herbs such as henbane and the gruit mixtures used elsewhere. Violations could be punished by confiscation of the beer.

Wheat beer and other exceptions

From the start, Bavaria made exceptions. The noble Degenberger family held a ducal privilege to brew wheat beer, and when the line died out in 1602 the right passed to the Wittelsbach dukes, who ran a lucrative state monopoly on weissbier for about two centuries. In 1872 Georg Schneider bought the right to brew wheat beer from the royal house, founding the brewery behind today's Schneider Weisse. Modern German wheat beer is legal because top-fermented beers may use malted wheat.

From Bavarian rule to German law

The rule spread with Bavaria's influence. A beer tax law applied similar ingredient limits across the German Empire in 1906, though northern brewers kept some top-fermented traditions. Bavaria insisted on the purity rule as a condition for joining the Weimar Republic in 1919. The word Reinheitsgebot itself only came into use in 1918. After the Second World War, West Germany kept the principle in its 1952 beer tax law, the Biersteuergesetz.

In 1987 the European Court of Justice ruled in Commission v Germany (case 178/84) that Germany could not ban imports of beers brewed with other ingredients, as this blocked free trade. Germany complied for imports but kept the rule for its own brewers. Since then, foreign beers containing rice, corn or additives can be sold in Germany as beer.

The 1993 Provisional Beer Law

Today the rule lives in the Vorläufiges Biergesetz, the Provisional Beer Law of 1993, together with the Beer Ordinance (Bierverordnung). For bottom-fermented beers such as pilsner, helles and bock, only water, malted barley, hops and yeast are allowed. Top-fermented beers may also use other malted grains such as wheat, plus pure cane or beet sugar and some coloring sugars, though Bavaria does not allow the sugar exception for its own brewers.

Processing aids such as filtration agents are permitted if removed from the final beer. Brewers who want to use other ingredients need special approval. In 2005 the Federal Administrative Court allowed the Neuzeller Klosterbräu brewery in Brandenburg to keep selling Schwarzer Abt, brewed with sugar syrup, as beer, which weakened the rule in practice. Germany celebrated the 500th anniversary of the decree in 2016.

What it means today

For German brewers, the Reinheitsgebot is both a legal floor and a marketing asset. Labels such as gebraut nach dem Reinheitsgebot appear on most German beers, and the Deutscher Brauer-Bund promotes the rule as a quality guarantee. Critics argue it restricts innovation and bars historic styles that use spices, fruit or unmalted grain, such as Belgian witbier or the coriander-spiced gose of Leipzig, which needed special permits. Beers brewed in Germany under other recipes must apply for an exemption or avoid the word beer.