Cannabis Club
Greatly popular, and an ancient cultural asset at the same time: in our Cannabis Club speciality beer, a refreshing beer is enriched into a pleasingly well-rounded shandy that owes its flowery, citrusy, and bitter notes to hemp flowers. The highly committed „Hanf & Natur“ company initiated our intererest in hemp, starting us on our path in creating this highlight for creative beer drinkers and hemp afficionados.
Today, the know-how about this plant that has been cultivated since ancient times is brought to life again, with hemp making its way back into agriculture. Before the beer purity law was established in Bavaria in 1516, brewers would often use in-house mixes of herbs, called Gruit or Kruut (from the German word Kraut for herb) for bittering and spicing up beers. Hemp was a widely cultivated plant then, and it's a safe bet to assume that because of its bitterness, it was often a constituent of the Gruit mixes.
In some countries, the tradition of brewing beer with herbs has been kept up.
Today, the hemp plant has been re-discovered as a kind of „jack of all trades“ with many and varied uses and a high importance in ecology. The Klosterbrauerei Weißenohe offers the Bioland farmers that supply us the opportunity to give hemp its well-earned position in their crop rotation and market their produce to us for our hemp beer. That way, we can promote and stabilize cultivation of hemp as a unique and useful crop plant, and do the same for Bioland organic farming at the same time.
Raw Materials
Vienna malt blended with Pilsen malt, and both of them made for us locally, in the Klostermalz Wirth Frauenaurach malting plant that will process Bioland organically grown malting barley according to Bioland organic processor regulations. For our brewery, we prefer using light-colored malt blends, as we like to achieve color by intensive mashing (cooking of the malt-and-water mix that is called mash) instead of by more hotly roasted malts which are likely to have an unpleasingly bitter aroma from the roasting.
Only the most refined Bioland organic aroma hops grown locally, in the area around Hersbruck, find their way into our hemp beer. Even a hemp beer will need a proper amount of hops added in order to achieve a well-rounded taste and facilitate the brewing process. However, the hemp beer can do with a smaller amount of hops than a „normal“ beer, as the hemp provides some bitterness of its own.
The source of our brewing water is a brewery-owned, well-controlled spring. So we are in a happy position: we can process water that mirrors, in its carbonated composition, our “Franconian Switzerland” landscape with its limestone rock geology. The quality of our water (with a nitrate content that keeps far below the 25 mg per litre that are permitted under Bioland processor regulations) enables us to brew our beers with „active“ spring water, instead of being forced to pump up „dead“ water from very deep down.
We also prefer to process hemp from organic farming. A fibre hemp almost free of THC, in the form of an essential oil, is used during the brewing process.
- Type: shandy mixed from 95% of vollbier and 5% of spring water, hemp-flavored
- Original wort: P 12
- ABV 4.9 %
- Seals of quality: Bioland organic farming association; EU eco label; certified by Eco Inspection Body DE-006-Öko
- EAN Code: 4 030414 900999
- Produced for: Hanf und Natur, Gimborner Straße 98, 51709 Marienheide, Germany
- by: Klosterbrauerei Weissenohe, Klosterstraße 20, 91367 Weissenohe, Germany
- Best before: at least 12 months after bottling
- All of our beers that are made according to the Bioland processor regulations, are controlled by an independent institute (ABCERT AG, Germany).
- EU Eco Inspection Body DE-ÖKO-006.
