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A Short Treatise on Homebrewing & the Meaning of Gruit

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About brewing

Why brew at home? If you’re perfectly satisfied with the taste of Budweiser or Coors, you’re not going to save any money by trying to reproduce their stuff in your own kitchen (1). Moreover, unless you’re a fanatic for detail and cleanliness, you may not have a whole lot of luck reproducing more exotic or specialized beers, either. And if you haven’t noticed, the culture of homebrewing in the United States today is overwhelmingly male and techie. If math is a turn-off for you as it is for me, you probably won’t fit in.

But the good news is you can brew perfectly good beer without ever having to calculate final gravity, International Bitterness Units or degrees Lovibond. Unless you’re dead set on making light pilsners or other beers with very little taste–and therefore a very narrow range of error–you don’t have to be a fanatic. In fact, you can relax and enjoy the whole experimental aspect of brewing. The judicious use of hot tap water (or a dishwasher), iodine solution, large yeast starters and a whole range of herbs (including, but not limited to, hops) will neutralize the effects of most bacteria and wild yeasts (2). The better news is that if you enjoy altered states (and who doesn’t?) you can quite easily brew stuff that will blow away anything you can buy–even from your friendly neighborhood microbrewery. You don’t have to break laws, either. (At least, not any major ones.)

There’s a strong aesthetic dimension to homebrewing: it’s more like alchemy than chemistry. Anyone who likes to cook will love to brew. But more than that, for me it’s a way of connecting with my Northern European ancestors. Brewing ales and making meads was (and is) a highly developed art, something Europeans did that is truly worth celebrating. It’s a tradition with submerged elements of pre-Christian religious practice that add to my appreciation and sense of connection with pagan roots, though I have no urge to try and recreate those elements in any precise form. Actually, that’s not really possible–too much has been lost.

What we’re left with is mostly educated guesswork. Most gruit recipes were closely held secrets that were passed down in families or jealously guarded by monasteries, and very few authentic formulas have survived. That’s why, for me, it’s so much fun to play around with gruits.

Gruit Ale: Unhopped and delicious

So what’s a gruit? Simply stated, it’s a blend of herbs that traditional brewers added to their beer in Renaissance times and before. Herbs are essential ingredients in beer, both as preservatives and to counterbalance the otherwise cloying taste of malt. You may hear such herbs referred to as hop substitutes, but that’s historically inaccurate. Hops are a gruit substitute. You don’t need hops to make beer, but you do need something–or else plan to drink it immediately, before it can spoil (see discussion of small ale, below).

Let’s start with the language. “Gruit” (grut) is actually the German term; the English word was “grout,” though for some reason the former term has been revived, so we might as well stick with it. You won’t find either word in the Oxford English Dictionary–that’s how completely they fell out of use. “Grout,” of course, continues to mean a thick, muddy sediment, but it’s now applied only to a kind of mortar, not to the stuff that accumulates in the bottom of your brewing vessel when you add a lot of herbs to the wort. “Wort,” of course, is an old way of saying “herb,” and contemporary usage still reflects this: until the hops are added it’s still just sophisticated sugar-water–malt extract and/or mash. (See Note 4 for a brief explanation of mashing.)

But what’s wrong with hops? Nothing, if you need help going to sleep, going to the bathroom or going through menopause. Hops are a strong sedative, a good diuretic and an estrogen substitute. If you’re a guy, however, you should be aware of a well-documented but under-reported phenomenon known as Brewer’s Droop. In technical terms, hops are a strong anaphrodisiac for men.

Some otherwise fairly reliable sources of information on brewing with herbs claim that hops came into use because of their superior antiseptic properties. Reference to a good herbal should quickly dispel this notion (3). In general, any herb with strong bittering qualities is also a reliable antiseptic: common examples include yarrow, wormwood, mugwort, sage, heather, oak bark, dandelion roots or leaves, juniper berries and branches, nettles, yarrow, ground ivy (a.k.a. alehoof) and many more.

Hops & gruit rivalry

The story of how hopped beer came to replace gruited ale is a complex and convoluted one, with origins in both the Protestant Reformation and the Industrial Revolution. An anti-gruit campaign, similar in scope and absurdity to our contemporary War On Drugs, fed off the anti-clerical and anti-pleasure hysteria of the Protestant Reformation, and coincided with the violent persecution of herbalists as witches and herbs as dangerous substitutes for “scientific” medicine in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It didn’t help that gruit blends in many parts of northern Europe were exclusive monopolies of the Church. All brewers in those areas were forced to purchase their gruits from specially licensed monastic houses at highly inflated prices, which probably did more to enflame anti-clerical feelings than anything Martin Luther ever said.

It’s also important to remember that most brewers throughout the Middle Ages and into the Renaissance were women. In England, at least, the competition between “modern” beer brewers and makers of old-fashioned ale took on aspects of a war between the sexes, though it was also about urban vs. rural and large-scale vs. small-scale production. Studies of tax records from the period suggest that, in more rural areas, the vast majority of commercially produced gruit ale was made by part-time brewsters or “alewives”–female homebrewers who sold their surplus ale, typically advertising a new batch by sticking a broom out the window. As long as brewing remained a minor, local activity–a source of seasonal, supplemental income for farmers’ and tradesmen’s wives–nobody cared. But when it became obvious that there was serious money to be made, men began elbowing in. The fact that hopped German “bier” was exempted from the regulations protecting the brewsters’ guilds simply provided the fulcrum. A vicious propaganda campaign stereotyped alewives as filthy, slatternly cheats who never missed a chance to adulterate their brew.

The much-lauded German Beer Purity Laws have their inception in anti-gruit and anti-homebrew regulations of this period, and formed part of the same irrational phobia toward the (darker) Other that culminated in the Nazi holocaust. To this day, many beer purists insist that any addition of non-grain-derived sugars–much less herbs and spices–makes a brew fit only for the ignorant, unwashed masses. And of course the wave of Protestant-instigated intolerance peaked in the temperance movement of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The resulting prohibitions were the nail in the coffin for most local brewing traditions. Nowhere was the intolerance as strong as in the Prohibition-era United States; our modern centralized, homogenized corporate brewing landscape is the result.

Fortunately, the tradition of homebrewing was never completely eradicated from the farmstead, especially in the more remote corners of Scotland (where heather ale was the persecuted national drink) and in parts of Scandinavia. But on this side of the Atlantic, contemporary homebrewers have learned (or relearned) quite a bit since the days of Prohibition, when exploding bottles and “off” batches were regarded as normal, occupational hazards of brewing at home.

There’s no simple explanation for why hops won the war in Britain, where malting and ale-brewing traditions were so elaborated and so firmly entrenched in the culture. I suspect that the sedative properties of hopped beer were a big part of the answer, however. Working people had long been in the habit of drinking weak ale–“small drink” in the parlance of the day–from the second running of the grain (4). The prolonged boiling meant it was much safer to drink than water. Alcohol content typically ranged from 1-3%, and given the heavy grain bills common with less efficiently sprouted malt, this weak ale would have been highly nutritious–a major source of B vitamins, among other things.

German-style hopped beer was introduced specifically to fill that niche. (Coffee and tea came in a little later. The British tradition of High Tea is simply a transmogrified version of the peasant’s traditional, ale-centered supper.) The big operations of these urban, male brewers made them the natural choice for supplying the rapidly growing English navy in the 16th and 17th centuries. And it’s my feeling that the much longer hours and unprecedented drudgery imposed upon the industrializing workforce would’ve proved intolerable without a cheap, readily available, state-supported sedative. In any event, the near-total loss of homebrewing traditions, including the making of gruits, coincided with the destruction of rural life by the Enclosure Acts and the Industrial Revolution.

the meaning of gruit

Gruited ale made from the first running of the grain was (and is) a very different drink from the day-to-day small ale. The latter was quickly consumed, so it didn’t matter if it was unstable. But the “real ale,” as they called it, was designed to hold up in the cellar a good, long time (hence the higher alcohol content) and served a wholly different purpose–promoting gaiety at multi-day, village-wide events such as weddings or patron saints’ festivals. Depending on the district, it might have been made by the larger brewsters, by the breweries attached to aristocratic households, and/or by monasteries.

The important point is that the Mediaeval and Renaissance calendar was liberally peppered with holidays; before the Industrial Revolution, roughly a quarter of the year was given over to festivals of one sort or another. For most of these occasions, celebrants needed a drink that would keep them awake and energetic. Many of the popular gruit herbs helped do this. In addition, some of these herbs had religious connotations that survived the switch from pre-Christian to Christian practices. Sweet flag or calamus, for instance, provided both a mildly euphorogenic gruit ingredient (the roots) and a popular, aromatic floor covering for churches on festive occasions (the rush-like leaves). Tansy was sacred to the Virgin, and angelica–as its name suggests–evoked the power of the archangel, St. Michael.

In the vitalistic worldview of pre-modern Europeans, plants were credited with distinct personalities and powers. For example, sage–its English name a corruption of the Latin salvia–was thought to have salvific properties, both literal and figurative. The sage plants in one’s garden were regarded as talismans and totems of a sort, whose fortunes would wane or grow with their owners’.

The powerful women’s herb rue was used in spells to ward off black magic and bestow second sight. Its use in gruit formulas was probably more common than contemporary records admit, since such a strong ally against the spoiling of ale (often attributed to witchcraft) would work best as a covert agent.

The name of St. John’s wort reflects a similar belief about that herb. Curiously, while modern researchers have substantiated its strong anti-depressant properties, they’ve also found that people who take St. John’s wort should avoid direct sunlight, or else they can suffer from a mild form of poisoning. Nothing could be more emblematic of the mysterious, ambivalent power of gruit herbs!

What does all this mean for the homebrewer? Above all, it provides an outlet for the experimental impulse. Even if more gruit recipes HAD been preserved, they might not have been much help: medieval recipes were gloriously imprecise. Also, herbs can vary greatly in strength depending on when and how they are harvested, how old they are, what part of the tree or plant they’re from, etc. I’m personally not very interested in trying to recreate historical recipes, though if I were brewing in quantity for a big celebration I’d probably give some of the surviving guidelines a bit more attention. I mostly brew for my own use and for a few guests and friends, so the typical American pattern of bottled 5-gallon batches suits me fine.

I do, however, appreciate the convenience of being able to get a decent buzz off of one 16-oz. bottle, and I really like strong, earthy tastes. A local source of really good (and cheap) wildflower honey has helped convince me of the wisdom of adding a pound or two of honey to every batch of ale. Honey has antimicrobial properties of its own, and adds a great deal not just to the alcohol content but to the quality and duration of the buzz. And the herbs make the kitchen smell even more wonderful than the malt alone.

I’ve provided recipes for a few of my most successful ales, but beginners will still need to get a copy of “the homebrewer’s bible”–The New Complete Joy of Homebrewing, by Charlie Papazian–and make a few very basic beers to get comfortable with the process before branching out. A good online tutorial is available at the 7 Bridges Cooperative website, http://www.breworganic.com. And there’s a great archive of homebrewing articles at http://brewery.org/brewery/Library.html. Check out the “styles” section for information on chicha, sahti, sorghum beer and many other strange brews. (For more links, go to my links page.)

If you’ve never brewed, there’s never been a better time to start. With the help of the internet, you can locate cheap supplies and all sorts of exotic ingredients that might’ve taken months to hunt down just a few years ago. If you’re already a homebrewer, congratulations. It’s legions of American homebrewers who, over the last 30 years, have made the microbrew revolution possible.

But the revolution, like all good parties, isn’t over in just one night. Take the next step. Go gruit!


references

(1) There are, of course, sound political and ethical reasons for not supporting repressive and homogenizing mega-corporations, but those really add up to an argument for supporting your local microbrewery–an increasingly viable option even for those of us out in the sticks. The beers they typically produce may seem weird or different, but remember: your great-grandparents drank stuff just like it. At least, whenever the corn crop failed.

(2) That’s “neutralize,” not “eliminate.” Don’t be a fascist! The goal of the homebrewer–as even the clean freak Charlie Papazian stresses–is SANITATION, not complete sterility. And consider: bacteria and wild yeasts play an important role in some of the most prized and exotic styles. Why should you deny yourself the chance to brew beers that are just as strange? Nothing that can live in alcohol can kill you. (Accidental methanol production is only a concern for distillers.) The one type of bacteria you absolutely DON’T want is the stuff that wants to turn your brew into vinegar. Though some of the other strains can do annoying things, as well, like blow up bottles. Or worse, make your beer taste like wine. So keep it clean, kick up the alcohol content, and don’t stint on the mugwort!

(3) Good old Maude Grieve even gives some gruit formulas in her section on hops! The whole of her classic Modern Herbal is now available for free on line, too, though at $22.00 for the 2-volume set from Dover, you ought to consider just coughing up the dough. It makes great bedtime reading.

(4) For the benefit of non-brewers: alcohol is obtained by feeding sugar to yeast. In beer or ale, that sugar comes largely from grains, most of which must first be malted–sprouted for a couple days until they start to swell, then dried or roasted for storage. The soul of the brewer’s art lies not in the fermentation–even vintners can manage that–but in the conversion of starches in the malted grain to sugar. Before thermometers, especially, this was a highly arcane affair. But in essence one maintains a sort of porridge–the mash–at certain temperatures for varying lengths of time, then drains off the sugar-laden water: the first running. In modern practice, one then rinses the remaining sugar from the grains with additional, boiling water–the sparge–and adds that to the mash. But in the old days, a larger quantity of hot water would be used to steep the grains a second time. This would then be drained off for the second running, which would be made into a wholly separate, weaker brew. Sometimes, however, the brewster would add honey to the second runnings to make a strong, mead-ale hybrid called a braggot. And occasionally a very weak third running would also be drawn off.

Posted in Perspective

Gruit: past and present

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By Alexandre Bessette

Gruit can be understood in a historically precise sense, but also in a larger view: when Hops are optional, call it Gruit Ale.

 

What Gruit was then

Before beer, it was Gruit. For more than 700 years, Gruit Ale was the brewed beverage of medieval Europe. Like today’s beer, it was brewed with water, cereal grain and yeast. Unlike today’s beer, it was spiced with any number of over 60 plants in herbs, roots and spices form. The Hop, which is now the quintessential aromatic and bittering herb of our contemporary beers, was before but one of many herbs sometimes used by brewers in their recipes. Hops were often completely unknown in some brewing areas of Europe. Instead, brewers relied on a healthy collection of herbs. This was Gruit Ale. It has a fascinating history: centuries of consumption, Gruit recipes and taxes were controlled by Church operated monopolies, followed by an ideological and mercantile competition with the Hop which resulted in the Prohibition of Gruit and its eventual downfall.

What Gruit is today

Today, Gruit is making a comeback. Brewers are slowly realizing that although Hops is a delicious herbal addition to beer, it has its fair share of down sides. As with any brewed herb, Hops conveys a number of qualities to the beer we drink. It helps to preserve the brew, gives it a delicate bouquet and delicious bitter taste – but it also causes drowsiness and diminishes sexual desire. Gruit Ale, with its herbs, roots and spices not only convey varied taste and flavor to a brew, but also a myriad of medicinal and psychotropic qualities. If we’re to remember anything at all from our brewing and beer loving ancestors, it’s that choice ingredients play a defining part in the way beer makes us feel. To the attentive mind, all plants are psychotropic; they all change consciousness, awareness, understanding, and sense of self. Hops do. But so does Yarrow, Rosemary, Sweet gale, Juniper, Licorice, Wormwood, Chamomile, Mugwort, Cardamom seeds, and countless others.

A bove all else, Gruit Ale is about thinking beer outside the cone… the monolithic Hops cone. Why should we limit ourselves to one single brewing herb? Gruit is an open window on a forgotten brewing tradition which inspires renewed brewing possibilities.

And isn’t that what craft brewing is all about?

 

Posted in Perspective

Gruit Herbs Harvest in Northern Québec

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By Alexandre Bessette

In the summer of 2010, my wife and I headed for a 14 hour drive North of our home in Montréal to reach the Basse Côte Nord region. The search for the Holy Gruit Herbs had begun.

 

The Gruit Harvest was made near the 50th paralell.

 

As we drove deeper North along the St-Laurent river, we noticed true signs
of the overlapping biomes, tundra and taiga.

 

Canadian Shield bog. Labrador Tea grows numerous here but no higher than 2 feet.
Many of the small plants on the foreground are Labrador tea.

 

My wife harvesting Sweet Gale like a trooper, in ancle deep bog water.
Myrica gale thrives in bushes.

 

Labrador tea. This year’s new growth shoots up as older leaves show signs
of rusting after surviving the harsh winter.

 

Labrador tea in full bloom.

 

Our basic but quite fonctionnal herb drying area.
A large dehumidifier helped maintain a dry air circulation.

 

As we drove and walked to find bogs to wildcraft gruit herbs, we came accros quite a few
flowering yarrows. Yarrow grows well along disturbed areas like roads and paths.

 

Visit the gruithouse.com for information on ordering gruit herbs.
Posted in Brewer's Corner

Hops substitutes, Hops alternatives

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By Alexandre Bessette

 

Known substitutes or alternatives to Hops

  • Acacia myrtifolia
  • Achillea millefolium
  • Artemisia abrotanum
  • Artemisia absinthium
  • Calluna vulgaris
  • Daviesia latifolia
  • Dodonae viscosa
  • Fagara rhetsa
  • Glechoma hederacea
  • Gouania lupuloides
  • G. polygama
  • Humulus lupulus var. cordifolius
  • Menyanthes trifoliata
  • Origanum vulgare
  • Picrasma quassioides
  • Ptelea trifoliata
  • Pteridium aquilinum
  • Quassia amara
  • Rhamnus prinoides
  • Sarathamnus scoparius
  • Teucrium scorodonia

Posted in Brewer's Corner

Basic Gruit Botanicals

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By Alexandre Bessette

 

In essence, standart Gruit Ale is primarily a combination of three mild to moderatly narcotic herbs:

  • Yarrow (Achillea millefolium),
  • Sweet gale (Myrica gale),
  • Wild rosemary (Ledum palustre).

But for centuries brewers have used more than 64 plants in their beer recipes. Of these:

  • 50 % are aromatic,
  • 38 % are bittering,
  • 53 % are antiseptics,
  • 47 % are medicinal or believed to have magical virtues.

Perhaps what has made Hops so popular with brewers is that it covers all bases, being aromatic, bittering, antiseptic and medicinal. Other than Hops, only four plants would by themselves qualify in fulfilling all 4 functions :

  • Angelica,
  • Absinthe wormwood,
  • Juniper (berries),
  • Oregano.

Their origins are essentially European. The Asian plants which arrived in 11th century Europe became widespread by the 16th century, in reduced proportions however. After the 16th century, American plants such as sassafras (aromatic and antiseptic) also made their way into beer recipes.

Posted in Brewer's Corner

Points to remember when composing a good Gruit

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Points to remember when composing a good Gruit

By Dave Bonta / Used with kind permission

From my own,
fairly limited experience,
here are some points to remember in composing a good gruit:

  • Make sure you include a known antiseptic;
  • Many bitter herbs in leaf form benefit from a change of water to minimize harshness, hence the advisability of making infusions separate from the wort;
  • You can treat any flavorful bitter the same as hops, adding half at the beginning of the boil, and the other half at the end;
  • Many of the more delicate flavor-elements are carried off by the carbon dioxide (the other major byproduct of fermentation); hanging some or even most of your herbs in your brewing bucket during primary and/or secondary fermentations, or introducing more herbs at bottling time, are traditional ways of counteracting this effect that I’ve found work quite well;
  • Some herbs interact with alcohol to produce synergistic effects, such as licorice and calamus–another good reason for “dry-hopping”;
  • Sometimes less is more (I have a difficult time with this one);
  • You can make a good gruit with stuff that’s growing right where you live. Though imported spices have been used to flavor ales and meads for centuries, most major gruit herbs were extremely common, local trees, shrubs and weeds. So my feeling is, we Americans should experiment with native plants as much as possible (while not scorning the “green immigrants”). Early European colonists quickly adapted their brewing practices to the local pharmacopoeia, making beer with such natives as sassafras, wintergreen, wild ginger and wild sarsaparilla;
  • Most herbs are ridiculously easy to grow: they’re perennials, they have very few pests–even the deer leave them alone–and many of them actually prefer stony, infertile ground. This is especially true of the salvias and the artemisias;
  • Two ounces of any given dried herb is a good average quantity for a 5-gallon batch of beer (but of course there are plenty of exceptions).

If you’ve never brewed, there’s never been a better time to start. With the help of the internet, you can locate cheap supplies and all sorts of exotic ingredients that might’ve taken months to hunt down just a few years ago. If you’re already a homebrewer, congratulations. It’s legions of American homebrewers who, over the last 30 years, have made the microbrew revolution possible.

 

Posted in Brewer's Corner

The Fall of Gruit & the Rise of Brewer’s Droop

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By Stephen Harrod Buhner / Used with kind permission
PERPSECTIVE : Stephen Harrod Buhner writes about our forgotten beer heritage, Gruit Ale, it’s competition with Hops, it’s prohibition and fall into oblivion.

 

A forgotten heritage

It would have been inconceivable to our ancestors that gruit could ever be forgotten. But ask anyone today what it is and a blank stare or a bad joke about gardening will be all you will get – unless for some reason you happen to ask a beer historian. But for most of European history gruit (or sometimes grut) was what beer was. If you went into a pub in the middle ages in most of continental Europe you would have been served gruit. Hopped beers came much later, gaining dominance about 1750 A.D. – though gruit ale continued to be brewed in small, out-of-the-way places until World War 2.

Many people think hops became an additive to beer for its bittering and preservative qualities but the truth is quite different. Gruit was primarily a combination of three herbs: Sweet gale (Myrica gale), Yarrow (Achillea millefolium), and Marsh rosemary (Ledum palustre) though each commercial gruit ale varied somewhat. Different brewers added other herbs (such as juniper berries, ginger, caraway seed, aniseed, nutmeg, and cinnamon (1) to produce unique tastes, flavors, and effects in their ale. The exact formula for competing gruit ales was, like that for Coca Cola, proprietary – a closely guarded secret. Each of the three primary gruit herbs was also used alone in brewing simple beers in cottage practice. And references to one particular quality of those herbs abound in the literature of the times; they were extremely inebriating when fermented. The brewing historian Odd Nordland comments that among rural Norwegian brewers “It was said locally that when one drank much of [sweet gale], it was strongly intoxicating, with unpleasant after effects.” (2) The English herbalist Maude Grieve notes in her seminal Modern Herbal that “The leaves [of marsh rosemary] are reputed to be more powerful than those of Ledum latifolium [Labrador Tea], and to have in addition some narcotic properties, being used in Germany to make beer more intoxicating.” (3) But among them all yarrow, the innocuous garden herb, was best known as an inebriant. Odd Nordland explains:

According to Linneaus, it was used by the people of Lima in Dalecarnia, instead of hops, when they brewed for weddings: ‘. . . so that the guests become crazy.’ Linneaus called the plant galentara, ‘causing madness’, and this plant ‘which the people of Lima sometimes use in their ale stirs up the blood and makes one lose one’s balance.’. . . Yarrow is in no way innocent when mixed with ale. It has a strong odour and flavour, and well deserves the name Linnaeus gave it, to indicate the frenzy that was said to result from it.

The high virtues of Gruit

Modern scientific research has born out the fact these herbs do contain substances that are mildly narcotic, psychotropic, or inebriating. In fact, indigenous cultures throughout the world used these herbs for at least 60,000 years, not only for their medicinal actions but also as mild inebriants and sexual stimulants.

To understand why hops replaced gruit it is important keep in mind the properties of gruit ale: it is highly intoxicating and aphrodisiacal when consumed in sufficient quantity. Gruit ale stimulates the mind, creates euphoria and enhances sexual drive. Hopped ale is quite different. Contemporary scientific research has conclusively demonstrated that hops contains large quantities of estrogenic and soporific compounds. In fact hops has been used for many thousands of years in traditional medical practice as a natural estrogen replacement therapy and to help insomniacs sleep. The high level of plant estrogens in hops makes hopped beer an extremely good drink for women in menopause but also makes it a very bad drink for men. Consumption by men of large levels of estrogenic compounds can lead to erection problems later in life. In fact, there is a well-known condition in England called Brewer’s Droop which is regularly contracted by bartenders and brewers after years of exposure to hopped beers and ales.

Hops, when it began to be suggested for use as a primary additive to beer, was bitterly resisted – it was thought to be decidedly unhealthy as a primary ingredient in brewing. And hops’ introduction was fought through the legislatures, proclamations of the royalty, writings of the day’s medical practitioners, and through church edict.

Brewers in England complained to the Mayor of London about hops and noted that there was “a deceivable and unholesome fete in bruying of ale within the said citee nowe of late [that] is founde in puttyng of hoppes and other things in the said ale, contrary to the good and holesome manner of bruynge of Ale of old tyme used. . . . Pleas it therfore your saide good lordshyppe to forbid the putting into ale of any hops, herbs, or other like thing, but only licour, malte, and yeste.”

In Germany, as beer historian John Arnold comments: “Hopped beers, not alone their manufacture but also their importation into the domains of the Archbishop of Cologne, were strictly prohibited in various edicts, and infractions threatened with severe penalties. The reason for this was two-fold. First, the manufacture of gruit was a privilege, exploited or granted by the archbishop and bishops, hence a source of large revenue for them, a veritable ecclesiastical monopoly. Second, “gruit” contained herbs and spices, meeting the taste of that time (and of succeeding centuries), its composition being a mystery for the common people, and in any event a trade secret for the privileged manufacturer. This privilege was now threatened in the highest degree by the hops and hopped beers which began to appear from different localities.” . . . “How determinedly the archbishops for the reasons mentioned opposed the introduction of hopped beers [can be seen] from a decree issued, April 17, 1381, by Archbishop Frederick of Cologne, in behalf of the maintenance of the gruit monopoly, according to which not only the brewers, but also the clergy, the military and the civilians, in fact, anybody who wanted to brew beer were commanded to buy their gruit in the episcopal gruit-houses; furthermore, the importation of ‘hopped beer’ from Westphalia was prohibited, and so was the brewing of such beers in Cologne itself, under pain of the severest penalties which the Church could inflict.”

Hops, until this time, was merely one of the plants used all along in the production of beer – the earliest mention of its use probably being in Hildegard of Bingen’s (1098-1179) Physica Sacra. It finally gained herbal dominance in Germany (the first place its use was legally required) nearly the same time that Martin Luther was excommunicated by the Catholic church in 1520. This, I think, is not mere coincidence.

Luther and the Protestant temperance movement

One of the arguments of the Protestants against the Catholic clergy (and indeed of Catholicism) was Catholic self-indulgence: in food, drink, and lavish life style. And it was this Protestant outrage that was the genesis of the temperance movement. (It would not stop, of course, with the assault on gruit ales but would continue on to include ale itself and any kind of psychotropic or inebriating plants and drinks by the twentieth century.)

The Protestant reformists were joined by merchants and competing royals desiring to break the brewing monopoly of the church. The result was, ultimately, the end of a many-thousand-year tradition of herbal beer making in Europe and the narrowing of beer and ale into one limited expression of beer production, that of hopped ales or what we today call beer. The majority of historical beer writers insist that this was only because (after some 10,000 years) our ancestors accidentally discovered that hops was antiseptic enough to preserve beer. Our ancestors were neither that blind nor narrow in their empiricism. Hops kept the beer from spoiling, yes, however a number of other herbs possess strong antibacterial properties and can help beer “keep.” Many of those herbs were commonly used in ale, for instance wormwood and juniper. But hops possesses two characteristics notably different than the herbs it replaced – it causes the drinker to become drowsy and it diminishes sexual desire. Protestant literature of the time, denoting the “problems” associated with the gruit herbs, contradict contemporary beer historians and are in actuality some of the first drug control manifestos on record. The laws that eventually passed in the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries restricting the number of herbal additives used in brewing are actually the first drug control laws ever passed. As Nordland reveals: “At the time the decree of 1667 ordered an increase of cultivation of hops in Norway, the authorities in continental Europe were generally trying to abolish the use of grut and bog myrtle in brewing. The provincial laws of Bavaria, of 1533 and 1616, imposed severe penalties on anyone brewing ale with herbs and seeds not normally used for ale. Similar laws were passed in, for instance, Holstein in 1623, and [in Norway bog myrtle] was expressly forbidden together with other ‘unhealthy material’. As late as 1723, the laws of Brunswick-Luneburg made it a punishable offence for a brewer to have the dangerous Post [bog myrtle], or other herbs imparting a dangerous potency to the ale, in his house. It is stated that, in spite of earlier warnings, this practice had continued to the peril of the lives and health of His Majesty’s subjects.’

Prohibition

The historical record is clear that hops’ supplantation of other herbs was primarily a reflection of Protestant irritation about “drugs” and the Catholic church in concert with competing merchants trying to break a monopoly and so increase their profits. The motivations were religious and mercantile. Reasons not so different than the ones used to illegalize marijuana in the United States in the twentieth century. That this occurred is regrettable. Though gruit herbs do possess mild inebriating activities they are actually quite healthy for people when used in moderation. Though it might seem from the descriptions of the ancient writers that gruit herbs are in the same category as what we call “drugs” today they are in fact more similar in their effects to tequila than marijuana. The writers who described the dangerous effects of gruit were in fact those who wanted to outlaw their use and stop the indiscriminate use of excitants (as well as make money by being able to brew a competing product). But once hops supplanted gruit the vast majority of men throughout the western world were still being drugged by their beer only now they were being drugged into a dull, flaccid sleepiness.

RERERENCES

(1) John Arnold. Origin and History of Beer and Brewing Chicago,Alumni Association of the Wahl-Henius Institute of Fermentology, 1911, p. 239, 241.

(2) Odd Nordland. Brewing and Beer Traditions in Norway, Norway:The Norwegian Research Council for Science and the Humanities, 1969, page 216.

(3) Maude Grieve. A Modern Herbal, NY:Dover, 1971, page 460.

(4) Nordland. Brewing and Beer Traditions in Norway, page 223.

(5) Arnold. Origin and History of Beer and Brewing, page 375.

(6) Ibid, page 235.

(7) Ibid, page 237.

(8) Nordland. Brewing and Beer Traditions in Norway, page 221.

(9) Dr. John Harrison and the members of the Durden Park Beer Circle. Old British Beers and How to Make Them, London:Durden Park Beer Circle, 1991, page 21

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