You are reading a single comment by @Oliver Schick and its replies.
Click here to read the full conversation.
London Fixed Gear and Single-Speed is a community of predominantly fixed gear and single-speed cyclists in and around London, UK.
This site is supported almost exclusively by donations. Please consider donating a small amount regularly.
@Oliver Schick
Yes, it should all be vegan, but it's been interesting just now reading the wikipedia article in German:
[ame]http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reinheitsgebot[/ame]
Interestingly enough, the wikipedia article in English isn't nearly as good and looks like a translation of an earlier version of the article in German.
It seems to be quite a complex situation that can't be put in a nutshell. Briefly, there were various versions of beer laws in medieval German towns (Augsburg's apparently dating back to 1156), and the first large scale beer law was the Bavarian Beer Law of 1516, which ruled that only certain ingredients were to be used.
The situation as to which ingredients were to be used for which beer, however, doesn't seem nearly as clear-cut as is usually claimed.
Germany-wide beer tax laws (again containing rules about ingredients) were passed in 1923 and 1952 and the latter was in force until 1987, when it was abolished owing to a conflict with EU legislation. German brewers immediately vowed to stick to these older rules in any case, handing them a powerful marketing instrument against foreign beers (which previously hadn't even been on the market, I think).
Then there's a bit that I don't understand, which seems to claim that in 1993 a new beer tax law was promptly passed? Not sure how that would have got around EU Law, as the article doesn't say.
In all this complex discussion of ingredients, I couldn't find a mention of animal ingredients, although I don't know the origin of the chemical http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polyvinylpolypyrrolidon