In germany beer homebrewing is limited at 200L/year (approx 50gallons, which is a respectable but not huge amount if you have friends). Anything above you have to pay taxes on. Those taxes however are pretty minor for a typical 20L batch, and customs are only allowed to investigate a case if they suspect a big enough discrepancy (I think 10€). So there's a group of petty homebrewers who don't make use of their free 200L, but instead opt to report every single batch, only paying 0.01€. The intention is to waste time and annoy as many customs employees as possible to create friction and lobby against restrictions on homebrewing.
If it's just homebrewing / for personal, family / friends consumption, how would they even find out? A lot of laws are only there to enforce if they actually uncover a big operation.
Like, during the 'rona lockdowns you weren't allowed to have more than X visitors, but no policeman would want to go door to door to see if people were having visitors.
(actually don't quote me on it, the visitors thing may have been advisory)
> If it's just homebrewing / for personal, family / friends consumption, how would they even find out? A lot of laws are only there to enforce if they actually uncover a big operation.
True and that's kind of the joke. They aren't even allowed to do visitations without evidence of malpractice. But the laws surrounding it are even stranger: The beer produced should only be consumed at home, any outside consumption would require taxation, therefore homebrew competitions ask you to tax your submissions. They've actually went to homebrew competitions and busted people on the grounds of 10€ pP at most (But remember if I self report/pay it would only be a few ct - so even less). Homebrew meetups have never had problems before.
The background of the law (at least in folk telling) is that the big guys were worried about malt-extract making homebrewing so easy as to make commercial brewing superfluous.
> The background of the law (at least in folk telling) is that the big guys were worried about malt-extract making homebrewing so easy as to make commercial brewing superfluous.
which is funny, since it takes a lot of work to make good beer! most of that goes into sanitization, since with extract you aren't doing a mash, but it could lead to some very bland beers.
Yeah, beer prices in Germany are absurdly low. Unfortunately that also means that it's quite hard for smaller breweries to compete. The Franken region (densest brewery region) is seeing the slow death of the family brewery because the clientele is not up for even small price hikes. Even the deposit on the crates is an actual consideration for these brewers as people won't buy their beer at full price 10€ (they will get the money back on return of the crate) instead they usually require just a 3€ deposit. This means that the brewery is staking out 6-7€ per crate sold in hopes it returns functional.
If you're ever in Bavaria again, you should make a visit to Bamberg. It has an incredibly rich culture around beer. They are famous for smoked beer, though its just two breweries of about 20 making it. The others all have absurdly high quality beer at fair prices all with a certain amount of personality.
