Reinheitsgebot my arse

It is cited as the world's first consumer protection law.  It was intended to prevent the good folks of what would become Southern Germany to make beer in summer, spoiling it due to the high temperature encouraging bacteria and adding all sorts of muck to hide the awful taste.  So lord whatever of Bavaria (Duke Wilhelm the IV actually) said beer can only contain barley, hops and water.  This was before Pasteur alerted everyone to the wonderful organism that is yeast.  The actual truth of what the laws became is very convoluted and tedious.  But let's condense it to "just about anything goes in German beer these days, and has for most of history, but a little less goes in Bavaria, where the original law came from".  For more read here.

Some beer companies  use/used the gebot as a marketing tool.  Creating the impression that if you limit your ingredients somehow you are atop of the brewing pyramid.  German precision and all that.  Perhaps it was the Belgian attitude towards the reinheitsgbod that caused the Germans to invade.  Perhaps it was to learn more about beer making.  And perhaps because they had so much to learn, they had to go back.

Where the German tradition is one of barley and hops (and of course wheat and rye) the Belgians limit themselves to absolutely everything.  Adding fruits, candi sugar, oak barrels on top of barley and hops whenever it takes their fancy.

So this post is to celebrate some of the local brewers that do not constrain themselves by ancient Germanic customs and modern advertising.

Big on bottle: Big on flavour.

My first taste of what would become Van Hunks Pumpkin ale from Boston Breweries was like pumpkin fritters.  Pampoenkoekies.  This was the prototype with lots of cinnamon and nutmeg and pumpkin. Cinnamon fades faster than hops so nothing will quite match that first super fresh batch in my mind.  Cederbrew adds spices and actual pumpkins to make a, well, you guessed it,  pumpkin ale.  Darling's Christmas beer is also spiced.  Cinnamon and nutmeg again.

Wit bier is a Belgium style wheat beer where they frequently add oats, orange peel and coriander.  Darlings' Bonecrusher (faithful to the classic) is pretty much the reason I stopped trying to brew my own.  Honingklip adds chamomile, lemon and the obligatory coriander to their Wit.  Best wit I ever had was Anvil Ale's, made by Theo de Beer  ⁽¹⁾,   that used naartjie peel.

Lots of flavours

I wrote about lemon verbena and basil from Harfield brewery.  The ladies of Cederbrew adds lemon to their weiss.  They also add cherries to a blonde ale.  Eric van Heerden of Triggerfish uses buchu in the Bonito and adds coffee (lots of it) to his Champions Breakfast.  Another coffee-adder is Boston's Chris Barnard.  It is his Black River Stout that gets enhanced with coffee.  Over at Lilypatrick Frank Garaghty adds lactose to his stout, as does SAB to Castle Milk Stout.  Stellenbrau makes a rooibos infused beer⁽²⁾ with a semi-controversial patent.  Independent Beer and Spirit company's Bernard Kruger also use rooibos to elevate his Cochoqua⁽³⁾ Red Ale. This time added in the boil.

Honey is another favourite addition that should get the Germans still stuck in the past ⁽⁴⁾ annoyed.  Harfield calls theirs 1831 a Honey amber ale.  With the rooibos in the Cochoqua ale there is also fynbos honey.  The Birkenhead Honey Blond and the Boston Wild Honey Crystal Weiss makes use of the same ingredient.

The Red label is for seasonal or limited releases

And today a new one for me from one of my favourite breweries, Honingklip.  With their roots firmly in the Belgian tradition they think nothing about adding seasonal fruits, in this case  granadilla.  All passion fruit as the glass approach.  Not so beery on the taste with more subdued flavours of the fruit.  I like this beer.  It reminds me of a champagne cocktail. Obviously one with passion fruit.  The bad news is I only ordered three bottles. To bad they are gone for this season from the brewery.  If you're lucky some specialist store might have some left.  Go there.  Get some.  And then send it to me.


(1)    A really good surname for a brewer
(2)    Very good breakfast beer.
(3)    Pronounced koo-choo-kwa
(4)    Don't mention the war.