Bavarian Grill - Plano, Texas

The History of Bavarian Weiss Bier

When people think of Weissbier (“white beer”) nowadays, they invariably think of Bavaria — and rightly so, because the Bavarians not only put Weissbier on the map, they perfected it! Bavarian Weissbiers are wheat-based beers brewed with top-fermenting yeast, which means they are ales. As wheat ales, they stand apart from all other Bavarian beer styles, which are barley-based beers brewed with lager-making, bottom-fermenting yeast.

The first wheat beers in history, however, were not brewed by Bavarians. Rather, they were made far from the foothills of the Alps by Stone Age people who lived about six or seven thousand years ago along the Euphrates and Tigris rivers in what is now Iraq. Archaeologists call this early civilization the Sumerians. They were eventually conquered, around four thousand years ago, by the Assyrians, and then by Babylonians. But these conquerors brewed wheat beers, too — as did the Egyptians under the pharos, around the same time.

The oldest archeological proof of wheat-beer brewing in Germany dates from the Bronze Age. It comes from a 2,800-year old earthenware amphora that was discovered in 1934 in a tribal grave near the small village of Kasendorf, not far from Kulmbach in northern Bavaria. The amphora can now be seen in the Kulmbach Beer Museum. Scientists have determined that the residues in the amphora are from dark wheat beer.

Ever since those beginnings in the Bronze Age, however, Bavarian wheat-beer making had its ups and downs. More often than not, Bavarians made their beers from barley, mostly because the wheat harvest tended to be less reliable. There were frequent wheat crop failures in Bavaria throughout the ages. Authorities in Bavaria, therefore, were always anxious to restrict the use of wheat for bread-making only and to limit the brewing of beer to barley. They knew their subjects well and feared that, if given half a chance, the Bavarians would rather go without wheat bread than without wheat beer! In 1447, the Munich city council even felt it had to forbid wheat beer brewing altogether. The councilors decreed that, within their jurisdiction, brewers could henceforth use only barley — a rule that Duke Wilhelm IV extended to all of Bavaria 69 years later, in the now-famous Bavarian Beer Purity Law of 1516.

In theory, the barley-only provision of the Beer Purity Law should have been the death knell of Weissbier-making in Bavaria ... but it wasn’t! This is mostly because the medieval Dukes of Wittelsbach, the rulers of Bavaria, had more than just selfless concerns for their subjects’ health to guide them in their beer-political decision-making. They were also guided by purely fiscal calculations. And these drove them in the opposite direction from the goals of the Purity Law, as is evidenced by their strange dealings with the Dukes of Degenberg, in the remote village of Schwarzach, deep in the Bavarian Forest, near the Czech border.

Just four years after the passage of the Beer Purity Law, in 1520, the Dukes of Wittelsbach, nicely ensconced in their cosmopolitan capital of Munich, granted their vassal from the hinterland, Sigismund von Degenberg, the exclusive privilege to brew and sell Weissbier in his home region — for a hefty fee, of course. The Dukes of Wittelsbach explicitly confirmed the Weissbier ban earlier in 1567, and even derided the brew as a “useless drink” that wastes wheat and encourages nothing but public drunkenness. The Degenbergers, however, were once again exempt from the law — only their fee for the privilege went up. The last Duke of Degenberg died in 1602 without leaving an heir, which was a fortuitous event for the Wittelsbach Duke Maximilian I, because he now found himself the owner of all the Degenberg clan’s assets — including their Weissbier privilege. Such were the rules of inheritance in feudal Bavaria.

Instead of letting the privilege die, Maximilian quickly seized upon it for himself by extending it to all the lands of his realm. Henceforth, only he would be allowed to brew it, and he would reap handsome profits from his monopoly. To ensure the proper transfer of brewing knowledge, he ordered the Degenberger’s former Weissbier-brewmaster, Siegmund Bettl, to come to Munich. There, Master Bettl built the Wittelsbachers’s first “white” brewery. It stood smack downtown on the location of the current Hofbräuhaus pub. Innkeeper Maximilian opened shop in 1605 and never looked back. During the Thirty Years War (1618 – 1848), only the revenues from the insatiable Weissbier thirst of the Bavarian subjects allowed the Catholic House of Wittelsbach to raise the armies needed to fight off the invasion of the Protestant King Gustaf II Adolph of Sweden.

Soon every little town and village in Bavaria had its own Wittelsbach Weissbier brewery, and the profits from the monopoly rose to almost one third of the entire state revenues. The fiscal bonanza lasted for almost a century and a half, when, by the end of the 18th century, “white beer” gradually fell out of favor, Weissbier revenues declined, and the House of Wittelsbach lost interest. In 1798, therefore, it allowed any nobleman and monastery to brew Weissbier. The measure did not save the wheat brew, however, and, by 1812, only two breweries were still making it. For all practical purpose, Weissbier had disappeared from the Bavarian beer menu — until, miraculously, it made a revolutionary comeback in the 1960s. With more than 35 percent market share today (and growing every year), Weissbier has become Bavaria’s best-selling style, surpassing even the traditional Bavarian signature beer, the Helles.