Brewer’s Star

25 April 2022 | Author/Destination: | Rubric: General, Bon appétit, Living, Working, Building Reading Time:  7 minutes

Stammhauses der Riegeler Brauerei © Andreas Schwarzkopf/cc-by-sa-3.0

Stammhauses der Riegeler Brauerei © Andreas Schwarzkopf/cc-by-sa-3.0

The brewer’s star (also: beer star, beer pointer, brew star, in the Upper Palatinate also Bierzoigl and Zoiglstern) is a six-pointed star (hexagram) that is used as a guild sign for brewers and maltsters. The brewer’s star is also the symbol for the issuing office of the house drink of a brewery, which is therefore also called “star” or “stars”. The six-pointed Zoigl star, which is formed from two interlocking equilateral triangles, symbolizes the three elements involved in brewing, fire, water and air, and on the other hand the ingredients water, malt and hops that were common in the late Middle Ages. In the house book of the Mendelschen Zwölfbrüderstiftung from 1425, a brewer named Hertel is shown at a brew kettle with a brewer’s star. There are (so far) various hypotheses about the origin of the brewer’s star.   read more…

500 years German Beer Purity Law

14 March 2016 | Author/Destination: | Rubric: General Reading Time:  11 minutes

Munich beer purity law from 1487 © Evergreen68/cc-by-sa-3.0

Munich beer purity law from 1487 © Evergreen68/cc-by-sa-3.0

The Reinheitsgebot, sometimes called the “German Beer Purity Law” in English, is the collective name for a series of regulations limiting the ingredients in beer in Germany and its predecessor states. The most well-known version of the law was adopted in Bavaria in 1516, but similar regulations predate the Bavarian order, and modern regulations also significantly differ from the 1516 Bavarian version. The most influential predecessor of the modern Reinheitsgebot was a law first adopted in the duchy of Munich in 1487. After Bavaria was reunited, the Munich law was adopted across the entirety of Bavaria on April 23, 1516. As Germany unified, Bavaria pushed for adoption of this law on a national basis. According to the 1516 Bavarian law, the only ingredients that could be used in the production of beer were water, barley and hops. The 1516 Bavarian law set the price of beer (depending on the time of year and type of beer), limited the profits made by innkeepers, and made confiscation the penalty for making impure beer.   read more…

Kilkenny City

15 October 2011 | Author/Destination: | Rubric: General Reading Time:  7 minutes

Kilkenny Castle © Przemysław Sakrajda

Kilkenny Castle © Przemysław Sakrajda

Kilkenny is a city and is the county town of the eponymous County Kilkenny in Ireland. It is situated on both banks of the River Nore in the province of Leinster, in the south-east of Ireland. The borough has a population of 8,661, however the majority of the population live outside the borough boundary, the 2006 Irish Census gives the total population of the Borough & Environs as 22,179.   read more…

Beer, Škoda, Plzeň – Czech Republic

20 January 2011 | Author/Destination: | Rubric: General, Architecture, European Union, European Capital of Culture Reading Time:  7 minutes

West Bohemian Museum © Norbert Aepli

West Bohemian Museum © Norbert Aepli

Plzeň (English: Pilsen) is a city in western Bohemia in the Czech Republic. It is the capital of the Plzeň Region and the fourth most populous city in the Czech Republic. It is located about 90 km west of Prague at the confluence of four rivers–the Radbuza, the Mže, the Úhlava, and the Úslava–which form the Berounka River. The city is known worldwide for Pilsener beer. Pilsen was in September 2010 selected by an official jury to be put forward to join the Belgian city of Mons as the European capital of culture in 2015.   read more…

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