GPS April 2020

Letters to the Editor
This is meant as a gentle correction
to one small phrase in the recent article
“Celebration Over 450 Years of the German
Beer Purity Law of 1516” by Walter Kurth in
the January/February 2020 issue of the German Postal Specialist,
pp. 23-24. On the last page, he said that the 1516 law specified that
“beer brewed in Bavaria would include only malt (barley), hops,
yeast and water.”
As the father of an American brewmaster and an investor
in his brewery, I have spent a considerable amount of time
“studying” beer. I’ll admit that the majority of my “research” has
involved tasting it, but I honestly have pursued a better understanding
of the history of beer along the way.
From my reading about the 1516 Reinheitsgebot für Bier
(Beer Purity Law), Bavarian beer could only be produced using
three ingredients; water, malted barley and hops. There is, and
from ancient times always has been, one more critically important
ingredient for beer production - yeast. Without yeast, there
is no fermentation, and without fermentation, there is no alcohol.
But in 1516, fermentation was a magical mystery and “yeast” had
no name, so it was not and could not have been specified in the
Purity Law.
Fortunately, ancient peoples around the globe and old
Bavarians as well knew enough to foster the process of fermentation,
but they could not name the catalyst behind the wonderful
final product until way more than 200 years after the 1516 law was
enacted. In the 1600s, a Dutchman named van Leeuwenhoek developed
magnifying lenses of such improved quality that single celled
micro-organisms could actually be seen in beer, but no one knew
what they were doing in there. The word “yeast” was first defined
in 1755 in Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language.
He helpfully described it as “the ferment put into drink to make it
work,” but it took Louis Pasteur until 1860 to fully describe the critically
important role of yeast in fermentation. If I had been called
upon in 1516 to help edit the Reinheitsgebot für Bier before its
publication, I believe I would have specified that good German beer
requires four ingredients; water, malted barley, hops and magic.
100
Thanks to Walter Kurth for featuring one of my favorite
German Postal Specialist