Brewers Erdinger, Schneider and Maisel launch „Noble Maturation“ seal

Germany | Never underestimate consumers‘ ignorance. In an effort to highlight wheat beer’s craft credentials, three well-known beer industry personalities have launched a seal.

On 20 September 2019, the owners of breweries Schneider Weisse, Erdinger and Maisel, Georg Schneider, Werner Brombach, and Jeff Maisel, announced that they have agreed to put a seal on their packaging, which extols the virtues of wheat beer’s maturation process.

Called “Bavarian Noble Maturation”, it shall inform consumers that their beers are more time-consuming and costly to produce, as they go through a second fermentation process, whereby the “green” beer is given a little unfermented wort and fresh yeast before bottling. The bottles are then stored in perfect conditions at the breweries’ warehouses for up to three weeks.

The seal also puts out the message that good beers, which don‘t follow the industry’s acceleration and rationalisation schemes to the letter, need to be more expensive. Mind you, by dispensing with pasteurisation, as Schneider, Erdinger and Maisel do, it may not be all that much more expensive to have beers mature in bottles for weeks. But if brewers put their money into human labour and quality checks instead, it could make their beers more appealing to consumers.

It is remarkable, nevertheless, that three Bavarian heritage brewers decided to overcome competitive pressures in a declining beer market and take a stand: for craft beer and traditional methods, which preserve history, and against the industry’s Zeitgeist of rationalisation and efficiency.

At the moment the three brewers will not rule out that in future the seal could become available to others too, provided they share their values and production process.