Read news from:
Austria
SHARE
COPY LINK

ALCOHOL

Biggest Bavarian brewer bans GM from beer

Germany's biggest beer company - Bavarian brewery Oettinger – has begun producing beer free from genetically modified ingredients, it was reported on Monday.

Published: 11 March 2013 12:47 CET
Biggest Bavarian brewer bans GM from beer
Photo: DPA

Soon Oettinger bottles will bear the “GM free” symbol, as production using the new ingredients begins straight away, Der Spiegel magazine reported on Monday.

The move was in response to requests made by consumers for more transparency from the brewery, owner and CEO Dirk Kollmar said.

He added that the brewery considered it an extension of Germany’s 1516 Rheinheitsgebot or beer purity law, which denotes beer can only be made from water, hops, malt and yeast.

Oettinger is an unusual brewery in that it does not belong to the beer industry’s umbrella organisation. This means that it can bypass intermediary traders and sell beer very cheaply. But this also means often forgoing expensive marketing and PR.

Industry experts said on Monday that Oettinger’s switch to non-GM could well prove to higher-end brewers that cheaper brands could brew under a seemingly more upmarket “purity law plus”.

The Local/jcw

Member comments

Log in here to leave a comment.
Become a Member to leave a comment.

MUNICH

Four injured as WWII bomb explodes near Munich train station

Four people were injured, one of them seriously, when a World War II bomb exploded at a building site near Munich's main train station on Wednesday, emergency services said.

Published: 1 December 2021 16:41 CET
Smoke rises after the WWII bomb exploded on a building site in Munich.
Smoke rises after the WWII bomb exploded on a building site in Munich. Photo: picture alliance/dpa | Privat

Construction workers had been drilling into the ground when the bomb exploded, a spokesman for the fire department said in a statement.

The blast was heard several kilometres away and scattered debris hundreds of metres, according to local media reports.

Images showed a plume of smoke rising directly next to the train tracks.

Bavaria interior minister Joachim Herrmann told Bild that the whole area was being searched.

Deutsche Bahn suspended its services on the affected lines in the afternoon.

Although trains started up again from 3pm, the rail operator said there would still be delays and cancellations to long-distance and local travel in the Munich area until evening. 

According to the fire service, the explosion happened near a bridge that must be passed by all trains travelling to or from the station.

The exact cause of the explosion is unclear, police said. So far, there are no indications of a criminal act.

WWII bombs are common in Germany

Some 75 years after the war, Germany remains littered with unexploded ordnance, often uncovered during construction work.

READ ALSO: What you need to know about WWII bomb disposals in Germany

However, most bombs are defused by experts before they explode.

Last year, seven World War II bombs were found on the future location of Tesla’s first European factory, just outside Berlin.

Sizeable bombs were also defused in Cologne and Dortmund last year.

In 2017, the discovery of a 1.4-tonne bomb in Frankfurt prompted the evacuation of 65,000 people — the largest such operation since the end of the war in Europe in 1945.

SHOW COMMENTS