Hidden treasures in the food-and-drink category

I posted some pictures of spring life yesterday, but I saved three for a different theme, which is foraging. I'll start of with a photo of a bee gathering food, for your viewing pleasure:

^{Olympus Stylus 1s, 300mm, ISO200, f8, 1/250s}

And, speaking of food, I then spotted some fresh mushrooms. I looked twice to be sure, as they are way out of season here, but there they were:

^{Olympus Stylus 1s, 300mm, ISO200, f8, 1/100s}

And now for the drink part of this post, which will interest a great many of you, as it is about beer.

Further on, in a field of heather, I saw this:

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

This is bog myrtle aka sweetgale. It has a sweet, resinous smell and it 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.

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!