Gruit

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Gruit (or sometimes grut) is an old fashioned herb mixture used for bittering and flavouring beer, before the extensive use of hops. Gruit or gruit 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, flavours, 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 known now 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. Notorious current commercial example would be, to name but a few, 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 Brittanny (using a gruit containing heather flowers, spices and some hops).

[edit] 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 Germanic 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 probable political factor would be the general emancipation of - notably German - princes 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 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 beers. The fact is that the switch to hops started a good four or five centuries before the Reformation in Germany, so the political explanation is more probable. Besides, Henry VIII, the very English King who broke the Anglican Church's allegiance to Rome, still tried to outlaw hopped beer after he broke away from Rome, which he wouldn't have done had there been a Protestant conspiration against gruit.

Another probable factor behind switching from gruit to hops could be concerns about public health. With stimulating, psychotropic and ultimately poisonous plants such as henbane (Hyoscyamus niger) or even deadly nightshade (Atropa belladona) 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 their innocuousness being relatively clear, they were ideally suited to the task. Other people have suggested hops were deliberatly chosen due to their sedative properties.