Will Hemp raise Germany's Brewing Consciousness?
By Asbjoern Gerlach
 I would like you to sit back, relax, not worry and have a homebrew, because you will need to stretch your imagination a little on the following story.
First, we will have to go way back in European history into the Middle Ages, because that is where it all began. At that time, the quality of beer was more or less a question of trial and error, at least for the consumer.
In the year 1516 (does that ring a bell) a guy called Wilhelm IV of Bavaria proclaimed a law that has influenced brewing history ever since. Some day he did to ensure beer quality and protected consumers' health, because various ingredients were randomly used to produce and spice fermentable beverages back in those days. Among them were dangerous and harmful plants like belladonna, datura and cannabis, to name a few. Others point out that the law allowed him to raise taxes on this product. Another opinion is that the law would prevent a great famine because the harvest of wheat was very bad that year (wheat was the main brewing grain in thta region at thta time, and you couldn't bake bread from barly only).
Whatever the true motivation, it is lost in time and probably won't ever be revealed. What we don't know is that, from the day forward, beer was allowed to be brewed only from malted barley, hops and water. Centuries later, yeast was discovered to be responsible for the fermentation process and was added to this selection of ingredients. Later on, two further exceptions were allowed: the use of sugar and malted wheat, but only in top-fermented beers. Nothing has changed since then.
You can't blame anybody for not foreseeint everything that might happen in the forthcoming 482 years, can you? And if something would no longer be up to date, you would try to alter it to make it suitable for present-day needs, wouldn't you? I mean, we do have very strict laws controlling every substance you could ever think of concerning ist effects on human health and ist use in food and beverages. And we do have overproduction here in Germany, so nobody would have to starve from shortage of bread. Ah, well, of course, there are the taxes. But even that argument does not aplly, as the following story will illustrate.
We opened Germany's first and so far only micro in October 1995. We have a connected bar, homebrew shop and specialty beer store. We also teach homebrew classes and serve mail-order customers all over Germany.
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