Beer Goggles.

There is knowledge of beer being produced and drunk as far back as 5000 years ago and with production now being worth world wide $294.5 billion it is not going away. So I thought I’d do some investigation into the ancient art of beer making.

Once upon a time beer was made with 3 ingredients but now it is made up of a concoction of additives, to create different tastes, better heads, and so much more. Like France is with bread, that bread can only be called bread if it is made with just 5 ingredients, so Germany is with beer.

The German beer market is sheltered from the rest of the worlds beer market by the German Brewers adherence to the Reinheitsgebot otherwise know as the German Beer Purity Law dating from 1516 and recently updated in 1993. According to the law the only allowed ingredients for making beer are water, hops and barley-malt. The law also requires that beers not using only barley-malt but rather wheat and rye must be top fermented. After its discovery yeast became the fourth legal ingredient and for top fermenting beers the use of sugar is also permitted. What is interesting is that it is said that the invention of bread and beer has been argued to be responsible for humanity’s ability to develop technology and build civilisations. It is to do with the fermenting process. Australian beer history starts very early in Australia’s colonial history; On 1 August 1768 as Captain Cook was fitting out the Endeavour for its voyage to Australia, Nathaniel Hulme wrote to Joseph Banks recommending that he take "a quantity of Molasses and Turpentine, in order to brew Beer with, for your daily drink, when your Water becomes bad. … Brewing Beer at sea will be peculiarly useful in case you should have stinking water on board; for I find by Experience that the smell of stinking water will be entirely destroyed by the process of fermentation”.

Beer is no longer made with just 3 ingredients although I’ve noticed that some beers are going back to traditional methods, by writing on the front no artificial additives or preservatives, but the idea is to read the ingredients. Well that’s what I thought. I decided to go on a beer hunt and found a bunch of cans in a recycling bin. To my surprise there was no ingredient list. So I had to call the consumer hot line, to find out exactly what is in beer. Many different man made sugars are used to create different tastes. Head improvers are also used like corn syrup and malto-dextrin, fermentation modifiers, preservatives, flavours and what ever else they need to add to make it low carb, low sugar, full flavoured or whatever other selling trick is working at the time.

Some beer manufacturers told me that they were secret ingredients (yeah pull the other leg!) and wouldn’t tell me. Coopers however said that they only made their beer with 4 ingredients. Beer made in most other countries apart from Germany are adding flavour preservatives and other additives. The tradition of real beer brewing is a dying art amongst producers. So to be sure you are drinking a beer without all the additives you will probably have to look around for German Beer or Coopers. Now I know that’s not buying Australian but unless the rest of the Australian beer makers decide to start making the original stuff then they may have to suffer the consequences. Not all German beer is expensive, the Aldi chain of supermarkets has German beer at very competitive prices. Or start brewing your own, but remember try and stick to the 4 main ingredients. Enjoy
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