Herbs in non-hopped beers

[TimT]

Mark I am blown away by your generosity, thank you so much for that spreadsheet which must have been a labour of love to compile. And I love how on this forum folks can say to you you're full of it and then give you something as wonderful and useful as that spreadsheet.

I'm willing to defer to your knowledge of the subject but it was my understanding that beer is often defined in laws in the as 'a fermented beverage of water, malt, hops, barley, and yeast' - and was taxed accordingly.

 

[Yob]

Its been taxed in many different ways over the centuries.

 

[TimT]

I'd love to try some heather ale some time Yob.

We might still have some Dandelion root tea lying around in the pantry so you never know, could give that a go in beer soon. And obviously plenty of dandelion weeds about.

 

[TimT]

Aside from the bittering there are plenty of culinary herbs that would be wonderful for beers because of their intensely fragrant qualities. By adding thyme, rosemary, sage, cretan savoury, lavender, rose, etc to the wort at the end of the boil and/or after, wondrous aromas are created that add to and contrast with the beer flavours nicely.

 

[brewtas]

Spruce tips get used by some brewers both on their own and alongside hops. Haven't tried it myself yet but it seems like a potentially good option.

 

[TimT]

Yep. Brewtas, you'll remember a previous conversation we had hereabouts on that very subject - the use of spruce and juniper in beers. We then went on to talk about Sahti!

I wanted to mention here in reply to Yob's comment that heather worked well in combination with hops - my spruce beer (well, my successful one) seemed to do something similar: the mild bitterness of the hops (Saaz) went well with the slightly sour-citrussy flavour of the spruce.

 

[brewtas]

Oops! I remember now that you mention it. That's how good my memory is!

 

[mr_wibble]

[...] but as soon as someone discovered hops, everyone who could get their hands on them dropped the alternatives as fast as they could and used hops!
This in the face of a great deal of opposition from those vested interest groups who in some places had control of the alternative bittering agent market – read a bit about the history of Gruit and the Church.

The right to sell gruit somehow came to be under the control of the church (perhaps out of monastic brewing). Since brewers were required to use this specific herb mixture, and they could only buy it from the single purveyor, it became quite a source of income, and a tax in all but name. During the middle ages, the so-named "gruitrecht" was traded, and in a lot of instances fell under the ownership of the city. Some cities waived the gruit tax to encourage local brewers, while other held it with an iron fist. In a lot of cases (most? all?) the content of the gruit mixture was a closely guarded secret - and perhaps this is why a formal ingredient list is so ill-defined today. That, and regional variation too I guess.

All this leads me to wonder if the switch to hops was not only popular because of the taste, but maybe it allowed one to make beer without paying the gruit tax?

 

[TimT]

Another benefit of gruit beer. If you make one and people like it, you can say "THANKS! I GREW IT MYSELF!" And wait for the groans....

My go-to book (and, I suppose, partly the inspiration for my current explorations in this topic) on herbal brewing, Stephen Harrod Buhner's 'Sacred Herbal and Healing Beers'*, takes a fairly detailed look at the history of gruit. He covers some of the explanations you cover, Mr Wibble, and also suggests that decisions about beer could have split along Catholic and Protestant lines, with Protestants being eager to differentiate themselves from Catholics - one way of doing this was by rejecting the old monastic system and preferring hopped beers.

Really it's probably a difficult subject to generalise about because a) gruit was originally a German word and do we know precisely the extent to which this German concept reached into other countries b.) people have been brewing beer for ages, with a variety of ingredients - so just as there is a period of time 'after gruit', there must have been a 'before gruit' period too, maybe where entirely different herbs were used c) it's easy to over-emphasise the importance of laws relating to gruit or hops now - they may just be consequences of historical movements that we're ignorant of, rather than the cause of them.

*Or it could possibly be 'Sacred Healing and Herbal Beers', it doesn't really matter.

 

[Ross]

I'd love to try some heather ale some time Yob.

We might still have some Dandelion root tea lying around in the pantry so you never know, could give that a go in beer soon. And obviously plenty of dandelion weeds about.

Our Celtic Heather Ale & Juniper Red Ale were on tap at Brother Burger in Fitzroy last week. Not sure if they have sold out or not.


cheers Ross

 

[evildrakey]

I've used Elecampane in some of my beers, meads, and liqueurs... It's got an amazing aroma and flavour

 

[TimT]

Lovely! Adding Elecampane to my list.

One of my other successful brews last year - a Scottish light with tagetes. Tagetes are a South American flower often referred to as a type of marigold, though I don't think the two plants are related. They're edible (mostly, check the write up on Wikipedia), and have a delightful sweet/cordially/pineapply aroma that is perfect for brews. (In fact I think they may have been used in several South American beers). When I made my tagetes beer I just used a minimum of hops for bittering and skipped the flavour and aroma hopping. Popped tagetes, if I recall correctly, directly into the fermenter and the flavour and smell transferred nicely over to the final brew. My last one seemed to have lost a bit of the sweet floral scent but the flower intriguingly seems to have left a spicy and slightly peppery flavour behind. Really worth using.

 

[TimT]

Giving a strong dandelion tea a go at the moment. Slightly medicinal taste - but very spicy and a strong earthy bitterness; it could go very well in a brew.

My previous (very uncontrolled) experiment with lavender - after having tested 1) lavender, steeped in hot water following a boil, 2) lavender, boiled for 10 minutes, and 3) lavender, just steeped in cool water - they all taste the same! But lavender in boiling water tends to colour the water. The taste seems to me one that would work best with light additions of lavender, not strong additions.

 

[spassmaschine]

c) it's easy to over-emphasise the importance of laws relating to gruit or hops now - they may just be consequences of historical movements that we're ignorant of, rather than the cause of them.

This is a good point. In many ways, I think maybe it makes sense to treat the laws as a mere codification of the changes that have already happened on the ground.

I remember reading an article a while ago that argued hops only really became more popular (in England, anyway) from the 16th century, as common land and church land was privatised or enclosed, initially for more profitable wool production. Commoners were pushed off the land into urban slums, and no longer had the means to brew or traipse the commons for herbs; they no longer lived close to the land and had to buy things (and consequently get waged jobs) they might previously have made themselves. Brewing went from being something done in the village by small-scale alewives and brewsters, to something done by big urban brewers (i.e. those with the capital to buy up land and invest in the initial production systems necessary for a high yield). Hops became the herb of choice because of their higher yield, and because of their much-longer lasting preservative properties (i'm sceptical that this is necessarily true, at least compared to some herbs), meaning beer could be distributed much further afield and brewers could thus sell to a much greater market.

So: hops became widespread because of changes in social relations - changes in the way people were able to access all the things. The prevalence of hops in brewing is a mere byproduct (though a tasty one) of beer becoming largely a commercial product, a commodity, rather than something done as part of daily living.

On the other hand, I am writing this on a home-brewing forum, so that kinda throws a spanner in the whole argument.

Also the changes in property relationships i'm talking about can't easily be separated from the changes in religious worship you guys were talking about above, i.e. the rise of various branches of Protestantism may have mirrored the rise and fall of different social classes, in various times and places.


Plus I can't remember where I read any of that and may very well be making it up.

 

[spassmaschine]

P.S. more in line with the topic of the thread, at the moment I'm brewing a herb beer using the fruit of native hop bush (Dodonea viscosa). Apparently some of the early European settlers made a few brews with it before hops had been brought out here. No idea if it'll taste any good; I imagine in this case, the switch from hop bush to actual hops may have been entirely taste-based.

 

[TimT]

Sticky hop bush - another plant I want to try brewing with, Spassmachine.

I know so little about Australian plants but there must be many that would help make good brews.

Another reason hops may have become preferred was they were simpler: why fiddle around with concoctions of two, three, four, ten, twenty herbs when one will do the trick? This reason would be *especially* attractive to large-scale commercial brewers: it would simplify their task and make it cheaper.

Early use of the sticky hop bush (or other brews, for example, spruce beer) that colonial records of Australia and the Americas talk about is an interesting example of this: the colonialists didn't take commercial brewers with them. They may have had a ship's chef, and the task of the chef would have been to create *something* edible and drinkable from the available resources. And many times, colonialists would have simply been thrown back onto their own resources, and they would have brewed using techniques they learnt from their mums or their friends. So brewing techniques were much more innovative (and sometimes dangerous) than those that commercial brewers would have used.

 

[TimT]

My book The Drunken Botanist mentions that old brewers were often fond of using plant resins and saps, even pine cones, in beer. Stuff like myrrh, for instance. One of the things I really love about hops is their pine-iness - so, well, this naturally suggests to me that pine needles, pine cones, pine sap, fir, spruce, juniper, other conifers - which have all been used in ales in the past - could be used in the same way now.

 

[manticle]

Baron had a couple of beers using indigenous plants. Lemon myrtle and wattleseed are the two I remember.
Didn't mond the beers although they were hopped beers with those ingredients not an alternative to hops.

 

[TimT]

At the previous (and first) meeting of our north of Melbourne Merri Creek Brewer Masher Whatever The Hell We're Going To Call Ourselves Group someone mentioned to me a short run of 'black wattle seed beer' an Aussie brewer put out - wattle seeds providing the bitterness. That's interesting - during the holidays I saw those black wattle seeds everywhere. I assume it's the same plant. (I guess this is the brewer you're referring to.)

Lemon myrtle sounds delightful.

 

[spassmaschine]

I think more or less all wattle seeds in aus are edible, but there's a bit of variation from species to species. From what I've heard, the most palatable wattle seeds come from Wirilda (Acacia retinoides), which is more a coastal plant in Vic. No idea whether the seeds from the silver wattles and blackwoods and lightwoods we get along the creek are any good.

That Drunken Botanist book looks amazing. TimT, is it worth the buy, would you say?