Beautiful German of the week.

Because somebody has to admire them.

Rory Lawton, an Irish beer expert in Berlin, thinks Germany’s Reinheitsgebot, or beer-purity law, is discouraging innovation. The 1516 law was intended to make it easier to tax beer, through levies on its permitted ingredients: malted barley, hops, water and, later, yeast. Centuries on, brewers began using the Reinheitsgebot as a marketing tool to promote their products as pure and authentic. If anything else is put into a brew made in Germany it cannot be called Bier, but must be labelled “alcoholic malt drink”.