Thursday, May 23, 2013

The Fracking Beer

There's a German brewer who came out with a public statement....begging Chancellor Merkel not to allow fracking in Germany....because it would spoil the sweet pure water supply.

Their concern is basically a 500-year purity standard that has stood the test of time.  They want real tests concluded, before anything moves forward.  This purity business?  Well....sometime in the spring of 1516.....over in Ingolstadt.....Duke Wilhelm IV stood up and just said there had to be pure beer, with some standards.  Naturally, this was done in Bavaria, and folks just said sure, and it's been a standard ever since.

There can only be yeast, hops, malt, and pure water in beer.....end of the story.  This pure water business is a pretty big deal.

Course, here's the thing.....there are some brewery operations that use special spring water.  And there are some which use local city water, from an approved spring-like source.  The purity deal?  It might be questionable....if you got down into the nuts and bolts of where the water came from.

The fracking stuff?  I don't think any leading political figure in Germany is anywhere near the point where they will agree on fracking.  It might be ten years away, as a minimum.  The driving force then....will be gas selling at three Euro a liter, and Germans will be demanding some type of action.

How much oil could they frack?  That's the curious thing.  There are private survey episodes going on in Germany, and I seriously that they'd ever tell the German government exactly how much is out there, or the best locations to drill.

So back to beer....don't worry.  German beer is going to stay the same, and this standard will last another 500 years easily.

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