Gruit

Gruit (or sometimes grut) is an old fashioned herb mixture used for bittering and flavoring beer, popular before the extensive use of hops. Gruit or grut ale may also refer to the beverage produced using gruit.

Gruit was a combination of herbs, some of the most common being mildly to moderately narcotic: sweet gale (Myrica gale), mugwort (Artemisia vulgaris), yarrow (Achillea millefolium), heather (Calluna vulgaris) and Marsh Labrador Tea (Rhododendron tomentosum, formerly known as Ledum palustre). Gruit varied somewhat, each gruit producer adding additional herbs to produce unique tastes, flavors, and effects. Other adjunct herbs were juniper berries, ginger, caraway seed, aniseed, nutmeg, and cinnamon or even hops in variable proportions; many of these ingredients may have psychotropic properties too. Some gruit ingredients are now known to have preservative qualities.

Some traditional types of unhopped beers such as sahti in Finland, which is spiced with juniper berries, and twigs, have survived the advent of hops, although gruit itself hasn't.

The 1990s microbreweries movement in the USA and Europe has seen a renewed interest for unhopped beers and quite a few have tried their hand at reviving ales brewed with gruits, or plants that once were used in it. Some commercial examples are Fraoch (using heather flowers, sweet gale and ginger) and Alba (using pine twigs and spruce buds) from Williams Brothers in Scotland; Myrica (using sweet gale) from O'Hanlons in England; Gageleer (also using sweet gale) from Proefbrouwerij in Belgium; and the Cervoise from Lancelot in Brittany (using a gruit containing heather flowers, spices and some hops).

Historical context

The exclusive use of gruit was gradually phased out in favour of the use of hops alone in a slow sweep across Europe occurring between the 11th century (in the south and east of the Holy Roman Empire) and the late 16th century (Great Britain). In 16th century Britain, a distinction was made between ale, which was unhopped, and beer, brought by Dutch merchants, which was hopped. (Note : Nowadays, ale refers to beers produced through a top-fermentation process, not unhopped beer.)

The phasing out of gruit from brewing is linked to various factors. A possible political factor would be the general emancipation of princes (mainly German) from the political influence of the Roman Catholic Church in a movement that eventually was to lead to Martin Luther's protestations turning into a fully-fledged uprise of those princes against the authority of Rome, in what is known as the Reformation. Princes wanting to undermine the power of the Church therefore tended to promote brewing with hops rather than gruit, to try and cut off this revenue for the monastic orders who had a monopoly on it.

Some authors (notably Stephen Harrod Buhner in his book Sacred and Herbal Healing Beers) have been tempted to oversimplify this and present the switch to hops as a Protestant crackdown on feisty Catholic tradition, and as a Puritan move to try and keep people from enjoying themselves with aphrodisiac and stimulating gruit ales by imposing the sedative effects of hops instead. This mostly Anglo-Saxon view can be traced back to hopped bier being originally introduced in the mid-16th century to England by Dutch merchants who also happened to be Protestants.

The fact is that the switch to hops started in Germany a good four or five centuries before the Reformation. Its later gradual enforcement in the 15th and early 16th centuries can in part be traced through some pieces of legislation drafted by political rulers before the Protestant Reformation even started. For example, the most notorious edict restricting spicing of beer to hops only (though, nowadays, most beer enthusiasts superficially reduce it to its "barley-only" clause), Bavaria's Reinheitsgebot dates from 1516, the year before Martin Luther kickstarted the Reformation by posting his 95 Theses on the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg. Earlier still, in 1434, the Statuta Thaberna [1] [2] in Weissensee, Thuringia already restricted beer brewing ingredients to malt, water and hops.

Another factor behind switching from gruit to hops could have been concerns about public health. With stimulating, psychotropic and ultimately poisonous plants such as henbane (Hyoscyamus niger) or even deadly nightshade (Atropa belladonna) being used rather routinely in beer brewing, local lords tended to want to edict a workable rule-of-thumb for the spicing of beer, preferably using a single, non-toxic herb which would be easier to monitor than a complex mix. Hops grow freely in most of continental Europe and its innocuousness being relatively clear, it was ideally suited to the task. Hops also have a number of advantages as far as spoil prevention: beer made with hops allegedly last longer than that made with gruit. This no doubt had a large impact on the choice to switch over, although it must be pointed out that other plants commonly used in gruit mixes, for example sage, rosemary or bog myrtle, also have antiseptic properties likely to extend the shelf life of beer.

See also

• Adjuncts
• Spruce beer

References

• Buhner, Stephen Harrod (1998-10-25). Sacred and Herbal Healing Beers. Siris Books. ISBN 0937381667.

Further reading

• . doi:10.1007/BF02042841. {{cite journal}}: Cite journal requires |journal= (help); Missing or empty |title= (help)

External links

• Gruit history, brewing and recipes at gruitale.com
• Gruit recipe from Sean Sweeney
• Gruit recipe from Patrick Kaeding
• A Modern Brewer's Take on Gruit