| Beer Name | Brewery | Style | Grade | Est. | Ingredients/Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
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🥇 1516 Certified
🥈 Pure Ingredients
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📖 Ingredients Reference
The Required Baseline
Malted Barley / Malt: The traditional grain base. Provides the fermentable sugars, body, colour, and core biscuity/sweet flavours.
Hops: The flowers of the hop plant. They act as a natural preservative and provide bitterness, aroma (floral, citrus, pine, etc.), and flavour.
Water: Typically adjusted for specific mineral content depending on the style (e.g., hard water for Burton ales).
Yeast: The organism responsible for fermentation. While not mentioned in the original 1516 law (as it hadn't been discovered yet!), it is an implicitly pure ingredient.
Common Additions (Minor Violations / Exceptions)
Wheat & Oats: Though technically violating a "barley-only" rule, these are traditional in many styles (like Wheat Beers/Weißbier) and are universally accepted in modern craft beer to provide a hazy appearance and a soft, "fluffy" mouthfeel.
Finings (Isinglass): Historically used in traditional UK cask ales to clear the beer quickly. Isinglass is derived from fish swim bladders, meaning the beer is not strictly vegan.
Impact: Moves beer from Grade S to Grade A as it introduces a non-traditional processing aid.
Mass Market Adjuncts (Major Violations)
Maize (Corn) & Rice: Widely used in mass-produced macro-lagers. These are fermentable sugars that lighten the body and flavour of the beer significantly, making it cheaper to produce and easier to drink in high volumes, but violating the traditional purity laws.
Glucose/Corn Syrup: Used to boost alcohol content cheaply without adding any malt flavour or body.
Flavourings / Extracts: Artificial or natural concentrated flavourings (e.g., in tequila-flavoured beers or cheap fruit ciders/beers) meant to mimic real ingredients.