No wine and beer for 14 year olds in Germany. The government has taken aim at a decades-old legal exception

Germany's youth minister has drawn up a bill that would remove the legal provision allowing 14- and 15-year-olds to buy and consume alcohol when accompanied by their parents, DPA reported Monday.

Germany, a country with relatively permissive underage drinking laws, wants to scrap a regulation introduced in 1952 that allows children to drink beer and wine under parental supervision from the age of 14.

Health ministers in several German states have called for a ban on it since last year, and federal youth minister Karin Prien included the measure in a bill on child and youth welfare.

According to the bill, this legal ability for children to consume alcohol under parental supervision “weakens protections for young people from the dangers of alcohol abuse and therefore contradicts the federal government's goals to improve addiction prevention.”

“The exception in the Youth Protection Act, which allows the consumption or purchase of alcoholic beverages by 14- and 15-year-olds accompanied by a person with parental responsibility, will be eliminated,” the bill also reads.

Discussions with industry experts

The initiative is to be discussed with industry experts, and to materialize it needs approval from both the federal government and parliament, so it is not yet clear when it will come into force.

A poll cited by Deutsche Welle in March 2025 showed that nearly two-thirds of Germans believe that 14-year-olds should be banned from drinking alcohol.

According to research carried out by Forsa, commissioned by the German health insurance company Kaufmännische Krankenkasse, just over half of Germans also believed that the legal age for purchasing beer and wine should be raised to 18 from 16.

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