The Bavarian Beer Regulation of 1516 Is Issued

On April 23, 1516, Dukes Wilhelm IV and Ludwig X issued a comprehensive Bavarian territorial ordinance at a meeting of the estates in Ingolstadt. Its beer provisions regulated maximum prices and required that beer brewed throughout the duchy’s cities, markets, and countryside use only barley, hops, and water. The ordinance extended rules resembling earlier regulations in Munich and Bavaria-Landshut across the reunited Duchy of Bavaria. By specifying barley rather than grain or malt generally, the ordinance excluded wheat from ordinary brewing and helped reserve wheat and rye for bread production. Wheat beer was therefore generally prohibited, but Bavarian rulers later granted selected noble families special privileges to brew it and eventually developed wheat-beer production into a lucrative ducal monopoly. The brewing provision became widely known as the Bavarian Reinheitsgebot, although the term emerged only centuries later. The 1516 ordinance was neither Germany’s first brewing regulation nor originally a law applying throughout Germany.