497 years since the proclamation of the Bavarian Reinheitsgebot I shall be celebrating with some lovely lager.
And I'll be in mourning with a Fuller's London Porter I got a store in FFM called A Taste of Britain.
Hater. The only German beer in the house right now is my wife's half of the Spezial we had delivered a while back (she takes her time, mine is all gone). I drank one of hers last night and she gave me a little grief, so I might have to make a trip out for something this afternoon.
These things take careful planning. Do I want a Hefe-weizen, or a Pils? It helps to have my mind made up before I go.
Actually I forgot that Bayern vs. Barca is today! Hopefully I will be able to go out for a few and watch the game in the local watering hole. Should be tremendous.
For the occasion I chose New Glarus Edel Pils as my after work repose. It's a reprisal of an old recipe the brewery used to brew as one of their standard labels and while they call it a Pils, it seems to be closer to a Helles in character to my palate. The hops just seem a little light, though there is a mildly tart, almost lemony flavor that lingers through the aftertaste. On the other hand, the malt character is quite nice; starts typically Germanic in a sweet breadiness and then blends to a lightly grainy, cracker-like character before finishing in that mild tartness. It's a pretty damn good lager - and fresh - from a small U.S. brewery and almost makes up for the envy that strikes when I hear Stahl talk about all his local breweries.
You shouldn't be mourning that date. You should be mourning the date when the RHG became a law in the whole of Germany, destroying centuries of brewing traditions in many places outside Bavaria.
It didn’t destroy those traditions. The free market did that. “Bayerisches Bier”, i.e. bottom-fermenting beer was supplanting other kinds in Northern Germany in the 19th century.
I was under the impression that those beers became illegal after the RHG became mandatory to be observed by every German brewery following the reunification in 1871.
