I’ll never forget going onstage at a beer tasting event in 1997. I was in my twenties and pretty nervous. The crowd seemed to really like hearing me talk about pouring pure apricot puree into the barley malt as it fermented to make Aprihop, our apricot-infused ale. But then an older, established brewer at a much bigger company followed me onstage.

“We are traditional brewers, not fad brewers,” he said at the podium. “I believe fruit belongs on your salad, not in your beer.”

This was early in the craft brewing renaissance. Most beer lovers, and even some of my fellow microbrewers, were underwhelmed by the ales we called “off-centered.” Some were hostile. They didn’t think it was cool that we were using everything from raisins to lavender in our beers. They thought we were heretics and weirdos. They said we were being disrespectful to brewing traditions. Whether they knew it or not, they were referring to the Reinheitsgebot, Germany’s beer purity law.

Five hundred years ago, on April 23, 1516, two Bavarian dukes enacted the law. “In all cities and markets and in the countryside,” the Reinheitsgebot reads, “only barley, hops, and water may be used for brewing beer.” (Yeast was added to the law later, after Louis Pasteur discovered what was doing the fermenting.)

At the time, brewers sometimes added soot, wood chips, and even toxic roots to beer. But experts think the law was really about protecting markets, not consumers. Brewers were barred from using wheat and rye so that bakers had enough to make bread. The law also capped the price of beer and effectively banned specialty beers from other regions.

I believe the centuries-long rule of the Reinheitsgebot has resulted in less diversity and creativity in the global beer marketplace. The regulation may apply only within Germany, but German emigrants exported their brewing tradition around the world. They founded Anheuser-Busch in the United States and Tsingtao in China. By the time I opened my business in 1995, homogenous industrial light lager dominated the commercial beer landscape worldwide.

I first read about Germany’s beer purity law in the New York Public Library in 1993, when I was doing research on my business plan. I knew Dogfish Head Craft Brewery was going to start off tiny, making 12 gallons of beer per batch. I wanted to make a strong statement. After reading the history of the Reinheitsgebot, I felt in my heart that the regulation is nothing more than a form of art censorship.

I have rebelled against authority and the status quo my whole life. As a teenager I discovered hip-hop and punk rock, feeling an immediate affinity for these outsider art forms. Eventually I would see parallels in craft brewing, where the bold and inventive stuff was happening not in the middle of the market but on the margins. And sitting there in the library, reading about this dusty old law that had narrowed the world’s taste for beer, I committed to brewing most of our beers outside of its feudal regimen.

I was going to flaunt the medieval regulation that had set the standard for beer for half a millennium.

When Dogfish Head opened in 1995, instead of genuflecting to established beer styles, we used exotic and fresh culinary ingredients. Within the first few months our beers used juniper berries, oak chips, vanilla beans, maple syrup, apricots, roasted coffee, and chicory.

It wasn’t easy. Beer drinkers were extremely skeptical, and people were afraid of change. With the company’s financial foundation still unsteady, bad publicity was the last thing we needed.

But we wanted to show beer lovers that we were tapping into brewing traditions far older than the Reinheitsgebot. For 10,000 years people have been making beer with whatever culinary ingredients and fermentable sugar sources they can grow wherever they happen to live. Save for the past 500 years, our ancestors didn’t limit themselves by creating or obeying laws about what natural ingredient should or could go into beer.

So in 1999 we reverse-engineered a 2,700-year-old brew. We partnered with the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology to do a sophisticated chemical analysis of drinking bowls excavated from the tomb of the king of Phrygia, in what today is central Turkey. It may be the final resting place of the real King Midas. Those bowls contained remnants of a beverage consumed at the farewell dinner outside the tomb.

Armed with that scientific knowledge, we recreated the brew from honey, barley, white Muscat grapes, and saffron. We called it Midas Touch. It gave credibility to what Dogfish Head was doing by showing that our company’s open-source brewing philosophy harkens back to the pre-Reinheitsgebot brewing era. In this way we may be the most traditional commercial brewery. Midas Touch remains a consumer favorite to this day.

Business experts look at what we did and say that Dogfish Head followed a blue ocean strategy. I guess the lesson for entrepreneurs is to question regulations — sometimes they benefit the consumer, but other times they just wall off a market. Instead of trying to get into the same rigged, competitive game as everyone else, ask yourself, “Can I create some new rules, a new space? Is there an opportunity to innovate, collaborate, and create value at the margins?”

One of my overarching beliefs is that most small businesses can benefit from spending more time focusing on the good karma that comes with collaboration, instead of the negative energy that bubbles to the surface when you focus on competition. That core belief has helped Dogfish Head grow from the U.S.’s smallest commercial brewery to a 300-person company selling millions of cases of beer in 30 states. We’ve also opened restaurants, distilleries, and a beer-themed harborside hotel.

Meanwhile, there are hundreds of other breweries constructing beautiful beers — not just with hops and barley but also with herbs, spices, fruits, and vegetables. Craft brewing communities are burgeoning in countries such as Australia, Italy, and Brazil, incorporating indigenous culinary ingredients and gaining market share and attention. This global movement has been marginalizing the Reinheitsgebot every day for many years now.

Don’t get me wrong. The Reinheitsgebot has endured because you can make great beer with the four core ingredients. But you can’t make many of the world’s boundlessly exotic and adventurous beers by sticking with only those four ingredients.

So in a way, I’m happy the German beer purity law exists — if it didn’t, I would not have had something so monolithic and overarching to rebel against when I started Dogfish Head.

The Reinheitsgebot is dead. Long live the Reinheitsgebot.