Gruit: Herbs, Spice, and Everything Nice

Beer before hops, Or, What Is Gruit?

Gruit conjures up images of medieval goblets and mysterious mixtures of herbs and spice. Gruit is also a reminder that the ale Europeans drank right up to the dawn of the early modern era was worlds away from the hopped beverage we’ve come to know and love.

But what is gruit? In its broadest sense, gruit was a spiced ale that people from the British Isles to Bavaria and Bohemia drank alongside wine and mead. It’s also the name of the mix of herbs and spices that gave the beverage its distinctive, potent, and occasionally sharp taste. And it’s this mix that opens a window onto the power-political dynamics of the time — for this was no mere packet of potpourri.

An Imperial Connection

The Holy Roman Emperor was the ultimate source of the Gruitrecht, which gave possessors the right to compose the gruit mixture and then sell it to brewers. Along with other rights such as tolls, markets, and minting, the emperor could grant the Gruitrecht to members of the nobility (typically counts) or the clergy (typically bishops).

The right could also be granted directly to monasteries or towns, or indirectly to these entities by nobility or clergy vested with these rights. Towns were willing to pay a premium for the Gruitrecht, preferring the political independence that came with collecting their own taxes. Owning the right also gave them authority over a growing industry with enormous income potential. In short, the Gruitrecht was a lucrative form of taxation that predated excise taxes on barrels of beer.[1]

Though the origins of gruit are shrouded in the proverbial mists of time, documentary evidence suggests that its use was already widespread by the tenth century.[2] The exact composition of gruit varied from one place to the next depending on local ecologies, and was often a closely guarded secret. So important was the art of making gruit to the episcopal authorities of Cologne that the town council directed a knowledgeable woman in 1420 to teach a certain brewer, and no one else, how to make it.[3]

In its most elemental form, gruit was a mix of herbs and spices used to flavour and preserve ale before the use of hops took hold in Europe. Bog myrtle (Myrica gale) grew readily in swampy ground close to the shores of lakes and rivers, and was among the most prominent ingredients. Wild rosemary was also a common ingredient. Other herbs and spices included bay leaves, ginger, anise, caraway seed, marjoram, mint, and sage. Even heather, juniper, wormwood, yarrow, spruce sap, and tree bark made it into the mixes of Flanders, Holland, Norway, and Anglo-Saxon England. Some speculate that hops made their way into gruit mixes as well.

Hops and the Eclipse of Gruit

Gruit was a major source of revenue in the Rhineland and Hansa cities of northern Germany. It was also common in Bavaria into the mid-fifteenth century.

But tastes, they were a changing. Monks in Bavarian monasteries, who had been cultivating hops in places like Freising since the ninth century, developed a beer brewed with barley, water, and hops.[4] Pilgrims, townspeople, and peasants began to develop an appreciation for the freshness of hopped beer in comparison with gruit.

Demand for beer rose steadily during the fifteenth century, requiring not only larger quantities of beer but also beer that could be stored longer. In contrast to gruit (the mix), hops were both cheaper and had a greater preservative power. Hops were thus more advantageous to brewers on the lookout for cost-cutting measures in light of the increased pressures to meet the demand, especially with exploding population growth.[5]

Pernicious Gruit?

As a side note, the temptation for brewers to use intoxicating herbs accompanied the rise in demand for beer, a state of affairs that played a role in the emergence of the various purity ordinances of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. With “safe” herbs and spices increasingly scarce, brewers turned to more dangerous substances like wormwood. The authorities, recognizing that hops were plentiful, began to lean more heavily on hops in their regulations as a means of forestalling the use of poisonous substances detrimental to human health.[6]

Time and Trade: The Advantages of Hops Over Gruit

Hops eventually carried the day in Cologne, in the Rhineland, in the Hanseatic cities, and in Bavaria, effectively expanding the reach of beer with their superior preservative qualities relative to gruit. Brewers could sell these more stable wares not only in their own urban markets, but also in more distant ones.[7]

Even still, in Cologne and other areas of the Rhineland, hopped beer proliferated more slowly in comparison with places like Bavaria.[8] Fearing a loss of income should hops gain a foothold, the archbishop tried to suppress hops completely, prohibiting the importation and production of hopped beer in a mandate dating from 1381.[9] But hopped beer — a beverage that the residents of the city clearly wanted to drink — eventually displaced gruit in Cologne, despite the numerous ordinances passed by city authorities. By 1495, Keutebier from the Netherlands had put paid to gruit, and it was only a matter of time before Bavaria’s hopped beers came knocking.

It was almost an afterthought when the city of Cologne concluded its 1495 treaty with the archbishop, sweeping away the once-princely tax that the city’s brewers had to pay for gruit. By now the archbishop, like so many other members of the nobility, clergy, and town councils who held the once-vaunted Gruitrecht, was seeing more revenue from excise taxes on barrels of beer than from his control of the tax on gruit. Tastes had moved on. And so had taxation.

Postscript

I wrote the bulk of this piece as a vignette for the Cologne chapter of the book I’ve been working on these past three years, tentatively titled Beerscapes of Germany. I inserted the footnotes here so that anyone interested in this aspect of beer history can get a sense of the historiography surrounding gruit and track down the sources I’ve managed to consult so far.  

Beyond that, this article sets the stage for my further exploration of what we’ve come to call the “Reinheitsgebot” (1516), which is actually just one of a series of municipal and ducal ordinances that ushered in hopped, bottom-fermented beer in Bavaria. A central question with regard to hops is this: Did the “Reinheitsgebot” kill gruit? Spoiler alert: No, it didn’t.  

Another question with regard to the rise of hops concerns the alleged psychotropic and aphrodisiacal properties of gruit, a position put forward by Stephen Herrod Buhner. A careful reading of the historical context that gave rise to the various ordinances culminating in the “Reinheitsgebot” of 1516 suggests that this position, while provocative, is based on historical inaccuracies. (One such: In places, Buhner frames his argument as a conflict between an austere Protestantism and the entrenched power of the Catholic church. The problem: gruit was long a thing of the past before Luther even dreamed of nailing his 95 Theses to the church door in Wittenberg in 1517.)   

The rapid eclipse of gruit by hops suggests another potential reading: “terroir” spelled the demise of gruit — especially in Bavaria — not the “Reinheitsgebot.” Simply put, hops grew well in Bavaria, and in quantity. It’s why the Hallertau is still the largest contiguous hop region in the world. 

And that’s just the start of it.  

Then there’s the Baker-Brewer Dispute that unfolded between 1481 and 1517, which sheds light on the  arrival in Bavaria of hopped, bottom-fermented beers from Bohemia as early as 1480 while also suggesting that the “Reinheitsgebot” of 1516 merely codified a long-existing state of affairs — analogous, in some senses, to the way legislation in the United States caught up to the fact of homebrewing. (Incidentally, this dispute was, at its core, about yeast — and named as such in the sources. Which is a clear refutation of the persistent notion that folks who lived in those supposedly benighted centuries before the advent of modernity had no idea what yeast was.) 

And then there’s the Sommersudverbot, or the prohibition of summer brewing. Fans of German beer know about this in the form of the feasts of St. Michael (29 September) and St. George (23 April). This prohibition, which was intimated in the “Reinheitsgebot” of 1516, is as significant as prescriptions regarding ingredients in the emergence of the kind of lager many of us have come to know today.

I know I always say this, but stay tuned! You may not yet see the patterns and connections, but I’ll do what I can to tie these strands together over the coming … months? Years? At any rate, prost, everyone!

Endnotes

[1] See Richard W. Unger, Beer in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), pp.32-33 and pp.43-44 for this historical background. See also Roel Mulder, “Further Notes on the Essence of Gruit: An Alternative View,” Brewery History 169 (2017), p.73 (on gruit as a kind of tax) and p.75 (as a spice mixture). Mulder’s article takes aim at positions espoused by Hans Ebbing (1994) and Frederik Ruis (2017) suggesting that gruit was a kind of powerful malt extract. Eoghan Walsh’s article in Good Beer Hunting (September 9, 2020), “The Gruit and the Good—The Enterprising German Brewers Bringing Gruit Back to Its Roots,” which I read as I was finishing up this article, covers similar ground in the early segments of his article.

[2] Unger, 31.

[3] Unger, 44. In a blog post on his Lost Beers blog entitled “Gruit: nothing mysterious about it” (July 2017), Mulder draws on archival records in Münster to bolster the claim he makes in the title of his piece. True, there seems to be no mystery surrounding what went into gruit in a broad sense, but this does not diminish the notion that the composition of the gruit herb-and-spice mix from one locale to the next was not common knowledge. Even if gruit house accounts deposited in archives give us a rough idea of what a particular gruit house ordered, it would be a stretch to assume that those accounts were readily available to contemporaries of the medieval period. I do, however, take Mulder’s point that our current emphasis on what kinds of plants grew locally is, perhaps, overstated, given that gruit houses were able to avail themselves of the market to purchase ingredients from distant places.

[4] See Karin Hackel-Stehr, “Das Brauwesen in Bayern: vom 14. bis 16. Jahrhundert, insbesondere die Entstehung und Entwicklung des Reinheitsgebotes (1516),” Ph.D. diss. (Berlin: Technische Universität Berlin, 1987). See also Unger.

[5] In comparison with hops, which could be cultivated and grew abundantly in particular regions of Europe, the herbs and spices that typically went into gruit were less amenable to cultivation.

[6] Hackel-Stehr, 349. As for Stephen Harrod Buhner’s Sacred Herbs and Healing Beers (Brewers Publications, 1998), his provocative contentions regarding the authorities’ abhorrence of gruit’s alleged intoxicating and aphrodisiacal character and preference for hops as a soporific that canceled sex drive and tamed excess is not borne out by the sources. A full accounting for why this is so would take me beyond the scope of this short piece. Suffice it to say, Buhner’s contention flies in the face of gruit as a major source of revenue for both the clergy and the nobility. Though the rise of hops is partially linked to concerns about the pernicious character of some herbs and spices, the history of gruit’s eclipse by hops, especially in places like Bavaria, is a complex history that has as much to do with municipal and ducal proclamations regulating the price of beer and restricting its ingredients. What we’ve come to call the “Reinheitsgebot” (1516) is only the most famous of this intense flurry of brewing ordinances spanning the fourteenth to the seventeenth centuries in Bavaria.

[7] Unger, 57.

[8] In the Munich public registries of the early fifteenth century the price of gruit is twice as high as that of hopped beer. In this same set of sources, “Bier” is mentioned several times compared with gruit’s cognates. This supports the notion that hops must have been much cheaper than the gruit mix by then. Indeed, it wasn’t long before hopped beer supplanted gruit altogether in Bavaria. Hackel-Stehr cites the following source: Dirr, Denkmäler des Münchner Stadtrechts, Satzungsbuch A, p.193, Art. 59, and Satzungsbuch B, p.243, Art. 12 and 12a. See also Mulder, “Further Notes on the Essence of Gruit,” pp.74-75, for an account of gruit’s eclipse by hops in the Low Countries, where hops seem to have predominated sooner than in the Rhineland. Gruit had disappeared in Leuven by 1423, and in 1437 a Delft tax collector observed that people had long since stopped brewing with gruit.

[9] See Hackel-Stehr, passim, and also Unger, 90.

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Images by F.D. Hofer, with the exception of the International Gruit Day graphic (International Gruit Day Facebook page) and the gruit ingredient graphic (Distant Mirror).

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