Beer before hops

^{Olympus Stylus 1s, 45mm, ISO100, f8, 1/100}

A nice bit of landscape, but what does it have to do with beer? What that just click bait?

Well, this post is about the bushes you see around the middle of the photo. Their leaves look like this:

^{Olympus Stylus 1s, 42mm, ISO200, f8, 1/60}

They are bog myrtle aka sweetgale (Myrica gale), gagel in Dutch. Bog myrtle has a sweet, resinous smell and can be used as an insect repellant.

More importantly: before hops took over the brewing industry in the 16th century, this was the main ingredient in a mixture called gruit, which was used as a bitter flavouring and conservative for beer.

Yes, beer!

Other ingredients of gruit commonly were mugwort, yarrow, ground ivy, horehound, and heather, but the composition varied. Other flavourings were added as well, following closely guarded secret recipes. As every town used to have a brewery to make something to drink besides the usually iffy water, there must have been hundreds of recipes for gruit.

Bog myrtle flowers:

^{Olympus Stylus 1s, 42mm, ISO200, f5.6, 1/160}

When hops were introduced for making beer, the use of gruit mixtures disappeared almost completely, but some of the smaller breweries that pop up all over these days (yay!) have reintroduced gruit and are making some rather pleasant beers with it, like the Dutch Jopen Koyt, which uses a gruit recipe from 1407.

Cheers!