Customs and Tax Legislation @museum.de

M: The state realised early on that there's a lot of money to be made from alcohol. The earliest evidence of a kind of tax on spirits was found in the city of Gdansk in present-day Poland. It was enacted in 1422 and shows that brandy, once valued as a panacea, was freely and copiously used as a stimulant.

F: But let's jump forward the 20th century. In 1919, the Weimar Republic launched the German spirits monopoly. On the one hand, the new regulation was meant to curb uncontrolled distilling while also guaranteeing extra tax revenue for the state. A special imperial monopoly administration was established for the purpose. It collected the alcohol from the local distilleries, and controlled both foreign imports and supplies to industry, which needed alcohol to produce cosmetics, medicines and alcoholic beverages. The German spirits monopoly was the only one of its kind in Europe.

M: In the 1970s, the law was abolished in its original form. But it continued to apply to smaller distilleries. Germany's spirits monopoly was finally abolished in 2017 and replaced by a new Alcohol Tax Act and an Alcohol Tax Ordinance.