PERSPECTIVE :Richard W. Unger, Ph.D., is professor of History at the University of British Colombia. He has published two great books on brewing history, A History of Brewing in Holland 900-1900 and Beer in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance.
Following are excerps on gruit and medieval brewing taken from A History of Brewing in Holland 900-1900. This book is available through brill.nl and offers a comprehensive history of brewing in Holland from the beginnings of large scale production at the end of the first millennium through medieval expansion, the boom of the Renaissance, and the disastrous decline of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
Beer is, according to the great nineteenth century scientist and one of the fathers of modern brewing, Louis Pasteur:
“...a beverage which has been known from the earliest times. It may be described as an infusion of germinated barley and hops, which has been caused to ferment after having been cooled, and which, by means of ‘settling’ and racking, has ultimately been brought to a high state of clarification. It is an alcoholic beverage, vegetable in its origin – a barley wine, as it is sometimes rightly called”. (1)
Even that broad definition does not do justice to the varieties of beer that brewers have made in Holland through the last twelve centuries. It can be any undistilled, fermented mal beverage of relatively low alcohol content. It does not even have to be made exclusively with malt or even exclusively with grain. It contains hundreds of different components and as a result there are many variations in the taste of the beverage.
Traces of diverse chemicals, organic or inorganic, can create small differences that the drinker can sense. Historically the terms used to describe different drinks made from grain have been less than precise which makes following the history of brewing difficult, but does indicate that brewing technology was far from static. The varieties of beer resulted from the choices brewers made in the ingredients they used and the way they treated those ingredients.
...various herbs or other plants were part of making beer, adding taste and (...) in some cases preservative qualities.
Both rural and monastic brewers used all kinds of additives in the Middle Ages to give a specific taste and other attributes to beer. Traditional practices in Norway examined in the twentieth century showed that the additives varied with local conditions and the availability of raw materials. The various herbs or other plants were part of making beer, adding taste and thought to add in some cases preservative qualities. That was presumably true in the Low Contries in the early and the Middle Ages. Without doubt there in that period the most popular additive, by far and away, was something called gruit.
Gruit was not unique to Holland or even to the Low Countries. Brewers used it commonly in the high Middle Ages throughout the lower Rhine Valley and in Scandinavia. It was even used in northern France. The exact origins of gruit or the earliest use of the additive is not known. It does appear, though, that governments played a prominent role, as early as the ninth century, in fixing gruit as the prominent additive for beer brewed in monastic or any other religious establishements. The need of the Count of Holland in 1324 to prohibit the making of gruit unless he had granted the right to do so suggests that in the countryside there were users of the additive. Evidence from towns confirms the widespread use of gruit, though urban sources are typically from a later period than the monastic ones.
There are different views of what was in gruit. Even as early as the 1600s, at least one writer had great trouble in deciding what might have been in it. The language of medieval documents is confusing since the additive traveled under a number of different names, both in Latin and in vernacular tongues. One theory equates gruit with fermented grain or with malt, that is with the essential raw materials of brewing. This theory was based in part on the proposed etymology of the word gruit, that is that it referred to the incomplete or rough grinding of the grains. Another explanation was that it was a combination of grains and has some role in aiding yeast. It is possible that part of the confusion over the term comes from the brewing method. In the early and high Middle Ages, rather than extracting nutrients from the malt in a separate mash tun before taking off the wort to boil it in a kettle, the two procedures typically took place in the same vessel. Water and malt could be thrown together in a kettle and heated along with any additives the brewer might think was helpful. Then the resulting liquor was placed in wooden troughs or even barrels for fermentation by airborne yeast. If the malt was introduced directly into the brewing kettle then the additives probably were mixed with the grains beforehand. In reading the documents assuming the later practice of separate mashing and brewing processes could be a source of confusion about the exact role of gruit.
Gruit gave beer a specific taste, smell and some resistance to spoilage. An act from the town of Huy of 1068 used the word pigmentum for gruit which suggests that it added color as well. There now seems to be little question that gruit was a mixture of dried herbs, included wild rosemary, with the most prominent ingredient being bog myrtle.
Bog myrtle or miricia gale is related probably most closely to the willow. It is a bush reaching about 1.5 meters in height and can grow in clumps. It is deciduous or along the shoreline so it was well-suited to the Netherlands. People picked the leaves, dried them, crushed them and then used them in making beer. There seem to have been other plants included, such as laurel leaves or the resin from an unknown plant called serpentine which is mentioned in some documents.
The best evidence for the composition comes from later in Middle Ages but it seems likely that the mixture of herbs was much the same from its earliest appearance in the records in the ninth century. There is no chemical indication that beer made with bog myrtle was more intoxicating or that it had a narcotic effect, though some contemporaries may have thought otherwise. There seems little doubt that beer made with gruit would have had a distinctive and probably potent taste.
Of Gruit, government and taxes
Government asserted the right to dispense of gruit. The source of gruitrecht, the exclusive right of supplying that herb mixture, was not a limitation or diminution of some greater government power but instead a specific imperial right vested in the emperor based on his authority over and control of the benefits from unused land. It was uncultivated land from which the bog myrtle came.
Gruitrecht proved a lucrative power, one which the counts jealously guarded and tried to extend, expand and perpetuate.
In the ninth and tenth centuries, as the empire of Charlemagne and with it public authority disintegrated, bishops and counts usurped many of the powers and functions of the emperor. In some cases, the emperor even gave away those powers. In 974, emperor Otto II, in granting a church in the district of Namur to a certain Notker of Liege also granted rights of toll, market, minting and gruitrecht. It is clear that the emperor considered the monopoly of trade in gruit to belong with other major regalian rights. The emperor in making such grants reaffirmed the public character of the right and his ownership of it. The recipient, count or bishop, got the income. Emperor Otto I had already made such a grant to the monastery at Gembloers perhaps as early as 946, one reaffirmed by Otto II in 979. A grant to the bishop of Utrecht in 999 placed Gruitrecht squarely among those powers which came from public authority. Emperor Otto III turned the town and district of Bommel over to the bishop along with toll and mint rights and the right to all trade in the raw material for beer. He used the word grut, a common term he said. The lands around Bommel south of the river Maas apparently are well-suited to the growing bog myrtle. Emperor Henry III in 1040 in making a grant to a nunnery divided very clearly the public powers, which included gruitrecht, from the fees and charges due the lord of the manor for the use of goods in his possession. Once recipients had the right from the emperor they could grant or lease it to others.
The supply of gruit to brewers was a right taken over by the counts of Holland and was in effect a right to levy a tax on beer production. It proved a lucrative power, one which the counts jealously guarded and tried to extend, expand and perpetuate. For the counts that meant insisting that all makers of beer throughout their domain use gruit supplied by the counts or their agents or those who had bought the right to distribution from them.
(1) Louis Pasteur, Studies on Fermentations,. The Disease of Beer, Their Causes, and the Means of Preventing Them. A Translation, Made with the Author's Sanction, of "Études sur la bière", with Notes, Indes and Original Illustrations by Frank Faulkner, author of "The Art of Brewing" etc. and D. Constable Robb (London, 1879), p. 1.