Sugar from sugar beets, Altbier or Old Beer from the Rhineland and the world's first newspaper are among the German discoveries, inventions and traditions we still love. Today, sugar beets flourish, newspapers battle for online subscribers ... and what can we say about beer? In Germany, it inspired the first consumer protection law.
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l. Sugar Beets - Extraction & Production
Sugar beets can grow in regions too cold for sugar cane, and produce the same type of sugar. Originating in Silesia, sugar beets have a conical, white, fleshy root or taproot. The plant is mostly root with a rosette of leaves. Sugar forms by photosynthesis in the leaves, to be stored in the root.
Extraction of sugar happened when Frederick the Great, king of Prussia, subsidized experiments to develop the process. In 1747, Andreas Sigismund Marggraf, professor of physics in Berlin, isolated sugar from beetroots. He found sugar extracted from beets was identical to that of sugar cane.
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His student and successor Franz Karl Achard began breeding sugar beets in Kaulsdorf near Berlin in 1786. He studied twenty-three varieties. Achard opened the world's first beet sugar factory in 1801, at Kunern, Silesia.
The French also loved the idea and European sugar beet industry rapidly expanded. By 1840, about 5% of the world's sugar was derived from sugar beets, and by 1880, the number ten times as much with over 50%. The top sugar beet producers today are Germany, Turkey, France, Russia and the United States. Sugar beets were introduced to the Americas by German settlers by mid-19th century.
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2. Altbier (Old Beer)
Altbier (German: old beer) is a type of beer brewed in the Rhineland, especially around Düsseldorf, Germany. The name comes from the top-fermented style of brewing, an older method than the bottom fermentation of lagers.
Altbier has a rich copper color. The use of a top-fermenting type of yeast, Saccharomyces cerevisiae, aka brewer's yeast or baker's yeast, adds a fruitiness to the flavor. It's then matured at cooler temperatures thus making it taste more like a lager (smooth, sweet, mild) than like other top-fermenting beers such as pale ale, wheat beers and stout.
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The first producer to use the name Altbier was the Schumacher brewery of Düsseldorf, opened in 1838. Germany takes beer-brewing very seriously, and production is subject to the Reinheitsgebot of 1516 established in Bavaria.
The Reinheitsgebot sets the standards for beer across Germany today. Although the rules have changed a little, the Reinheitsgebot is the first known consumer protection law.
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3. World's First Newspaper
Johann Carolus (1575 - 1634) published the first newspaper in the world in Strasbourg, then a free Imperial city of the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation. He called it Relation aller Fürnemmen und gedenckwürdigen Historien (Account of All Distinguished and Commemorable Stories). The World Association of Newspapers recognizes this as the world's first newspaper.
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Johann apprenticed as a bookbinder and later became a book seller, a scribe and a print shop owner. Being a friendly guy, through his occupations he made excellent connections with tradespeople and mail workers. In 1605, this helped him launch the weekly Relation.
From 1609 other newspapers followed in Europe, published in the towns of Wolfenbüttel, Basel, Frankfurt, Berlin and Gdańsk/Danzig in German; and in Amsterdam in Dutch. The concept caught on and newspapers appeared in Paris, Milan, Genoa, Edinburgh, Barcelona, Lisbon, Oxford, Copenhagen and more throughout the 1600s.
In the Americas, the first news publication was the Boston News-Letter of 1704. The first surviving American newspaper was the Maryland Gazette, founded in 1727 and now published as The Capital.
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