One of the many things the German people are renowned for is beer. With more than 1300 different breweries spread across the country, beer is an essential piece of their legacy and heritage. The Czechs and the Irish are the only ones above the Germans with beer drinking per capita. The monks began to experiment with brewing about one-thousand A.D. at the beginning of German history The nation's leaders eventually started to legislate the production of beer as brewing started to be more and more lucrative. The Bavarian Reinheitsgebot, or purity requirement, was enacted in fifteen-sixteen and remains the most well-known and influential component to effect German brewing.

To help guarantee Bavarian beers were only the best quality the Duke Wilhelm IV ordered the Bavarian Reinheitsgebot. Hops, barley, and water are the only ingredients that should go in in beer according to the regulation. The Reinheitsgebot is the oldest regulation placed on beverages in the world and has remain unchanged in nearly five-hundred years. The only addition to the act is the addition of yeast to the list of essential ingredients. Yeast found naturally in the air was what brewers before used. Because of the strict standard of quality followed by the purity requirement, Bavarian breweries were soon considered the superior producers of beer. As the prominence of the Bavarian breweries spread around the country more and more manufacturers began to adhere to the proclamation as well.

German beers have a long-standing position of producing quality brews made only from the purest ingredients as a result of the Reinheitsgebot. As time went on and Germany started to ship out beer, a lot of towns became famed brewing locations. The city of Bremen had over six-hundred breweries by fifteen-hundred and was the top exporter of beer to Holland, Scandinavia, England, and as far as India. Two more famed brewing cities were Einbeck and Braunschweig. Because of it's hardy flavor and right amount of foam the majority of modern Germans still choose fabbier, or draft beer, over bottle beer. In use still today, German beer steins came into use around the time the purity requirement came along in an effort to stop further breakouts of the bubonic plague.

Germany began a lot of laws to stop its people from getting ill during the era of the bubonic plague. Massive amounts of infected flies would fly in citizen's food and spread the infection. This led to the German beer stein, a beverage vessel with a hinged top that could be used with the thumb so a person could stop disease and still be able to drink with one hand. Beer drinking rose exponentially as citizens started to realize the disease spread in unsanitary conditions with stale pools of water. Originally made of stoneware with pewter tops, steins grew in popularity. As the pewter guild grew, steins started to be made completely of pewter and remained that way for over 300 years. Still produced today, silver and porcelain German beer steins were eventually introduced.

Over 5000 kinds of beer are made nowadays from more than thirteen-hundred and fifty breweries within Germany's lands. The oldest beer maker in the world that continues operation today is the Benedictine abbey Weihenstephan, that has been making beer since one-thousand and forty. The Franconia region of Bavaria near the city Bamberg is the most concentrated area for beer makers in Germany. The majority of beers can be categorized by ales and lagers but German beer makers make a wide variety of flavors. Some types of beer may have an alcoholic content as high as 12%, making them more potent than a lot of wines even though most beers have an alcoholic content ranging from 4.7% to 5.4%.