German Beer
It’s tough to get a decent German beer here in North America, and there’s a good reason for that.
The beer industry in Germany, (or so I’ve read,) is very localized – each region has a preferred brew that they specialize in. This only deepens the kind of inter-area rivalries that develop everywhere in the world, and prevents any one beer from becoming the Miller/Molson/Bud of Germany.
It’s also the reason German beer is so horribly delicious: no one wants to come from the place with shoddy ale.
(I’m looking at you, Leipzig.)
To help keep things that way, there’s a special dictate, The Reinheitsgebot:
The Reinheitsgebot (literally “purity order”), sometimes called the “German Beer Purity Law” or the “Bavarian Purity Law” in English, is a regulation concerning the production of beer in Germany. In the original text, the only ingredients that could be used in the production of beer were water, barley, and hops. After its discovery, yeast became the fourth legal ingredient. For top-fermenting beers the use of sugar is also permitted. – wikipedia
Not only does this mean that brewers are required to be reasonably pure in their brewing, it also means the extra garbage that gets thrown into North American wobbly pops prevents them from being sold in the Bundesrepublik Deutschland – without cheap Coors to crowd it off the market, Dunkler Bock has room to flourish.
