Plannin' a gruit!

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Yes it really does get very speculative when we get way back into the era of ale in every house - when ale was brewed every day, who would bother writing down all the recipes?
 
Its very difficult to take yourself back to medieval times, but you can look at the historical evidence that is available and come to some reasonable conclusions.

What comes to my mind is the seasonality of flavours, particularly sweetness. In northern Europe in winter you were shut up inside for months at a time because of the severe cold, with occasional brief forays outdoors (eg. to attend church, raid the dovecote for meat, and collect firewood - sticks and branches that fell from high up on trees because of the weight of snow). Your livestock was locked up too, in your house or in a barn (these were the animals remaining after you had butchered the rest of them in autumn because you didn't have enough hay in storage to keep them all alive until spring).

In this acrid, smoky household environment the taste of fresh ale with residual sweetness and little or no bitterness must have been a much anticipated joy, especially in contrast to the monotonous bitter and sour foods you were eating towards the end of winter - eg. rancid bacon and pickled vegetables. Come spring and summer there was sweetness in abundance, with honey, fruit and the sweet lactose in milk from your cows grazing on lush green pasture (as opposed to hay in winter).

The point I'm trying to make is that people were not chasing bitterness in their ale as we do now. Their preference would have been for sweetness because it was hard to get, particularly in winter. I disagree with those who propose that beer made today is the best beer ever made. For a start people did not drink beer until hops were used and that, in the long history of brewing, began five minutes ago. A lot of ale was drunk for a long time before and all the while hops were available.

If you had a time machine and took the finest of today's IPA back to medieval Europe they would probably spit it back in your face as horrible bitter piss. But people are very adaptable and tastes can be acquired and become rooted in culture if people are forced to adapt as happened with the Protestant Reformation.

As Tim has said earlier, the herbal mixture that was sold to be added to ale (gruit) up until the 1400s was a monopoly owned by the catholic monasteries. The rise of Protestantism was a reaction against the perceived excessive power and moral corruption within the Catholic church. Newly empowered protestant authorities ordered that gruit herbs be replaced with hops. It has been said that this was an economic attack on the catholic monopoly on gruit herbs. But consider also that the outlawing of gruit was perhaps an attempt by protestants to reduce vice and immorality.

The catholic church had many feast days. In the old church calendar there was some saint (great or small) to be commemorated just about every week. The protestant faith however frowned upon most of these feast days because of the drunkenness and debauchery that were exhibited at such events. In England in the early 1600s the extreme form of Protestantism known as Puritanism even banned the staging of plays because they were associated with excessive drinking and immorality.

The question I have is this. Was the dictate that gruit must end and hops be used to bitter ale (into beer) not just an economic attack on the catholic church's monopoly, but a move by protestant authorities to reduce the consumption of alcohol (and by association the sin of debauchery) by attempting to make beer less palatable? A similar move was apparently made in the time of Elizabeth I when it was decreed that lamb must be only be consumed with a bitter herb. This was at a time when England's economy was dependant on selling wool to the Low Countries, and it was a means to reduce the number of lambs being killed and being eaten by the peasants.

As I said people are very adaptable and rosemary soon became the bitter herb of preference to be taken with lamb, a tradition that survives to this day. And with beer the hop became not only accepted but sought after and bred into more palatable varieties. Such are the whims of fancies of the public taste.
 
Good thoughts about brewing history Feldon. You make the point very well about the importance of seasonaility; I tend to think that the great variety of traditional brewing ingredients found - from the exceedingly gentle (yarrow, meadowsweet) to the superlatively bitter (hops, gentian) indicate a great variety of tastes. Certainly many herbs can be dried and stored over winter - to a certain extent, in a cool to cold, dry climate, I suppose you could do this with hops as well - and so a wide variety of beers must have been possible at all times of the year, in households with some means at their disposal, anyway. One thing which is of great interest to me at the moment is the influence of age in brews - alcohol being a powerful preservative, surely some brews must have been kept around for a very long time, and therefore of suitability for drinking in winter.

The gradual favouring of hops over the other (arguably more ancient) gruit herbs must have occurred for many differing reasons. Stephen Harrod-Buhner does make some speculation about the attempt to ban hops being an attempt to favour 'protestant' brewers and end the Catholic monopoly; I'm not sure if he's the one who speculates that hops were favoured by protestants because of their sedative qualities - ie, they made for a sleepier, more docile workforce!

I suppose the authorities may have been trying to make beer less palatable by specifying a particular ingredient but I'm not sure what the evidence for this would be. That the Puritans were against pleasure and celebration and drunkenness is perhaps more a cliche than a fact; one early definition of Puritans were that they "loued [loved] no Lenten fast"; ie, they didn't abide by the common fasts and were pleasure seekers.
 
Yes, the Puritans liked a piss up as much as anyone. But they generally opposed communal games and drinking at events like harvest festivals on the village green or festivities that were celebrated in and around the local ale house. These were events where your kids could fall into temptation, and where a good number of village virgins might be lured into the hedgerows and impregnated. Protestants preferred to keep their revelry at home where there was more control.

There's a discussion on Puritanism and its relationship to leisure pursuits (including the quote "loved no Lenten fast") at https://books.google.com.au/books?id=KVE6QCJSLgYC&pg=PA113&lpg=PA113&dq=%22loved+no+lenten+fast%22&source=bl&ots=6zzXRsPArz&sig=W1CToPmdxFkuudZi2JQrU_yUXE8&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiH95rX0PvLAhUpsIMKHbHpCBYQ6AEIGzAA#v=onepage&q=%22loved%20no%20lenten%20fast%22&f=false
 
Heather ????????

looking at an upcoming brewing challenge replacing hops with herbs. Found references to heather as a gruit suitable additive. In all your investigations / readings, has anyone come across heather available in Australia for brewing ?
 
Just remembered I was going to post this! Somewhat delayed....

I don't quite understand the mash schedule, but it is what it is.

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It seems a version of the same recipe that Stephen Harrod-Buhner gives for gruit in his book.

I still think the amount of herbs in that recipe seem underdone, as many herb qualities fade, as I've noticed in my gruit, and after two/three months in an oak barrel I'm not sure if much will remain.

The conditioning with oak is an interesting touch though, and an oakiness may help to balance out the typical herbal beer sour/tart flavour. Is it authentic? I dunno - I think oakiness in some historical periods was considered a fault, and the inside of barrels were typically sealed (maybe with wax? Pitch?) But who knows whether this was common practice in the middle ages? Interesting anyway.
 
I don't know who sells heather, sorry, and it's probably not a plant that is well accustomed to the Australian climate. I'd try looking for it on Tealyra or overseas brewing supply stores.
 
Fatgodzilla said:
Heather ????????

looking at an upcoming brewing challenge replacing hops with herbs. Found references to heather as a gruit suitable additive. In all your investigations / readings, has anyone come across heather available in Australia for brewing ?
Pretty sure Yob did a heather ale a year or so ago - might be worth a PM
 
Yeah I got some off Yob that one time. Mine didn't turn out brilliantly, I found it a delicate flavour so maybe it's good with other floral element (eg, the trad gruit combo of yarrow, bog myrtle, and marsh rosemary).
 
Just leaving this as a note here - yesterday I cracked a bottle of my one year old dandelion and honey stout that I'd made entirely without hops. Last year it was undrinkable - much too tart. Now the tartness appears to have mostly aged out (there's still some). The honey and dandelion is coming through much stronger now, too.

So that could be a solution for brewing dark beers without hops. Just leave them aside for a year. Forget about them for another year. Remember them in the third year sometime and - party!
 
A brewery in Boston in the US released a gruit late last year for women going through menopause.

Sold out in in a flash.

Key ingredients were :

motherwort (hot flashes, night sweats), lemon balm (stress, anxiety), chamomile (moodiness, insomnia), stinging nettle (liver support, weight fluctuations), mugwort (stress, anxiety), rose (skin tone, heart palpitations), chickweed (fat build-up, dryness), and damania (loss of sexual desire, nervousness).

https://www.forbes.com/sites/taranu...ts-more-than-a-flash-in-the-pan/#57681ab74ad3
 
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