12 Grote

Bremen's 12 Grote denomination was a product of the city's stubborn monetary independence — the Grote being a north German unit Bremen clung to long after neighboring states had rationalized their coinage systems toward the Thaler standard. The 1859–1860 dates place this issue at the very end of that resistance; the German Coinage Act of 1857 had already forced a reckoning, and Bremen would abandon its traditional denominations entirely within a few years.

The .740 fineness is notably below the contemporaneous north German convention, a deliberate local choice tied to Bremen's commercial relationships with the Hanseatic trading network rather than any political union.