When the American craft beer boom took off in the 1990s, it didn’t take long before we got brews that were hopped to high heaven. But in the grand scheme of beer history, hops are actually a relatively recent addition.
When the Bavarian beer purity law (a.k.a. Reinheitsgebot) was put into effect in 1516, it mandated that all beer in Germany and the states of the former Holy Roman Empire could only be made with barley, water, and hops. Yeast was allowed, too, but wasn’t officially incorporated into the law until a few centuries later. Regardless, many other nations eventually followed suit. But if we roll back the clock to pre-purity-law times, it turns out that brewers were throwing all sorts of wild herbs and botanicals into their brews without any hops at all. These were known as gruit beers, and there’s a handful of breweries today that still make them.
To get some historical insight on gruits and how to brew them, we consulted with Brian Hunt, co-owner and executive brewer at Santa Rosa, Calif.’s Moonlight Brewing Company.
What Is Gruit?
In a nutshell, gruit is the catchall term for a blend of herbs and plants excluding hops used to flavor beer. Subsequently, any beer made with gruit is classified as a gruit or gruit ale. In ancient Egypt, brewers would use wild herbs, dates, olive oil, and meadowsweet (a swamp-dwelling herbaceous plant) to flavor and stabilize their beers.
“Everybody just used what they had,” Hunt says. In the first millennium A.D., all beer in Europe relied on gruit for the same purposes. It really wasn’t until the following few centuries that hops made it into the picture.
Gruit’s Herbaceous History
Today, all beer falls into one of two categories: ale or lager. But in 16th-century England, beer was considered to be the hoppy ales brought over by Dutch merchants, while ale was the unhopped stuff made domestically.
“Hops were considered unpatriotic, immoral, and therefore illegal in England in the year 1500,” Hunt says. “The Catholic Church in much of continental Europe controlled a lot of things, including gruit herbs. You could buy them from the church, and it was a way to tax the people that were allowed to sell them.”
Eventually, as hops became more ubiquitous outside England, the church began to change its views on what went into ales, especially since gruit herbs carried inadvertent psychoactive effects.
“A lot of the herbs used, as a matter of fact, were effective — they got you high,” Hunt says. On top of all sorts of plants tossed into gruit ales back in the day, the predominant herbs used were myrica gale, wild rosemary, and yarrow. “In yarrow, there’s a chemical compound called thujone. It’s in wormwood, too, and therefore absinthe,” Hunt says. “It’s a bit of a euphoric, and the federal government today only allows it in insignificant quantities.”
Once the church caught on, hops not only became allowed in British brewing, but they became more valuable than gruit herbs. “They were trying to be more proper and civilized,” Hunt says. “[Hops] chilled you out, so you were less likely to be a problem in the town, go crazy, and cause damage to property and stuff like that.” By the mid-1700s, IPAs were being shipped out from Britain, and hops became a staple of almost all beer from then on.
That said, plenty of regional gruit beers survived the test of time. Take Finland’s sahti, which is an ale flavored with juniper either in tandem with or without hops. And as recently as 2013, a number of craft brewers around the world banded together to mark Feb. 1 as International Gruit Day to pay homage to the largely lost tradition of brewing with various botanicals. But despite the craft brewing world’s alleged love for gruits, you’d be hard pressed to find one sitting on a shelf in even the most niche bottle shops. This is mainly due to three factors.
Gruits Today
The first obstacle for the gruit-issance is the widespread misconception that hops are the only sufficient preservative for beer. When we consider the advent of the IPA, many beers of the time were fortified with high ABVs and heavy doses of hops so that they wouldn’t spoil on their journeys to other parts of the world. This is all true, but as Hunt points out, hops discourage the production of some lactic acid bacteria, but not everything that could potentially make a beer spoil. “Many other herbs are also antimicrobial,” he says. “There’s a phenomenal number of spoilage creatures, and they each have their own susceptibilities to different things.”
The second issue is that gruits are a bit harder to brew than most other beer styles. “You figure there’s easily 250 different herbs that can be used in brewing gruits,” Hunt says. “If you consider what we have now, we’re using one plant to flavor all of our beer.” Admittedly, there are countless hop varieties from all over the world that have different nuances in flavor that set them apart from each other. But with gruit, the differences between herbs is much more vast, and the way a brewer extracts desired flavors from said herbs changes as well.
With hops, the general rule of thumb is that during the early wort boiling stages of brewing, brewers will add their bittering hops, as the longer, hotter boil will extract a hop’s more bitter attributes. When added later in the boil, that’s when more aromatic, floral, and fruity esters get imparted. But with gruit, the particular nature of the ingredients needs to be considered. “Tannins tend to be something that dissolve slowly in hot water,” Hunt says. “Mugwort needs to boil for a long time to get that bitterness. It’s a great bittering herb.”
On the flip side, anything that leans more aromatic in its raw form should be added during the latter end of the boil to get its character into the liquid without boiling it all away. “For example, I treat redwood branches like I would treat late hops,” Hunt says. “I throw them in the kettle near the end of my perceived boil time, and then I wait for their smell to fill the air.”
The third and arguably biggest thing keeping gruits from taking off is that taproom beertenders have to hand-sell every pint. “People are just averse to trying something new,” Hunt says. “When they step into a brewery, they expect ‘traditional’ beer.” This is not to say that gruits don’t taste great; we’re just not used to beer that has a more herbal profile.
“They’re just different,” Hunt says. “For example, if you love lasagna, but then you have a lasagna made with bechamel sauce instead of a red sauce, you might go, ‘This is entirely different, but f*ck, this is good.’”
*Image retrieved from pavelkant via stock.adobe.com
