T he story of how hopped beer came to replace gruited ale is a complex and convoluted one, with origins in both the Protestant Reformation and the Industrial Revolution. An anti-gruit campaign, similar in scope and absurdity to our contemporary War On Drugs, fed off the anti-clerical and anti-pleasure hysteria of the Protestant Reformation, and coincided with the violent persecution of herbalists as witches and herbs as dangerous substitutes for "scientific" medicine in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It didn't help that gruit blends in many parts of northern Europe were exclusive monopolies of the Church. All brewers in those areas were forced to purchase their gruits from specially licensed monastic houses at highly inflated prices, which probably did more to enflame anti-clerical feelings than anything Martin Luther ever said.
It's also important to remember that most brewers throughout the Middle Ages and into the Renaissance were women. In England, at least, the competition between "modern" beer brewers and makers of old-fashioned ale took on aspects of a war between the sexes, though it was also about urban vs. rural and large-scale vs. small-scale production. Studies of tax records from the period suggest that, in more rural areas, the vast majority of commercially produced gruit ale was made by part-time brewsters or "alewives"--female homebrewers who sold their surplus ale, typically advertising a new batch by sticking a broom out the window. As long as brewing remained a minor, local activity--a source of seasonal, supplemental income for farmers' and tradesmen's wives--nobody cared. But when it became obvious that there was serious money to be made, men began elbowing in. The fact that hopped German "bier" was exempted from the regulations protecting the brewsters' guilds simply provided the fulcrum. A vicious propaganda campaign stereotyped alewives as filthy, slatternly cheats who never missed a chance to adulterate their brew.
T he much-lauded German Beer Purity Laws have their inception in anti-gruit and anti-homebrew regulations of this period, and formed part of the same irrational phobia toward the (darker) Other that culminated in the Nazi holocaust. To this day, many beer purists insist that any addition of non-grain-derived sugars--much less herbs and spices--makes a brew fit only for the ignorant, unwashed masses. And of course the wave of Protestant-instigated intolerance peaked in the temperance movement of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The resulting prohibitions were the nail in the coffin for most local brewing traditions. Nowhere was the intolerance as strong as in the Prohibition-era United States; our modern centralized, homogenized corporate brewing landscape is the result.
The much-lauded German Beer Purity Laws have their inception in anti-gruit and anti-homebrew regulations
Fortunately, the tradition of homebrewing was never completely eradicated from the farmstead, especially in the more remote corners of Scotland (where heather ale was the persecuted national drink) and in parts of Scandinavia. But on this side of the Atlantic, contemporary homebrewers have learned (or relearned) quite a bit since the days of Prohibition, when exploding bottles and "off" batches were regarded as normal, occupational hazards of brewing at home.
There's no simple explanation for why hops won the war in Britain, where malting and ale-brewing traditions were so elaborated and so firmly entrenched in the culture. I suspect that the sedative properties of hopped beer were a big part of the answer, however. Working people had long been in the habit of drinking weak ale--"small drink" in the parlance of the day--from the second running of the grain (4). The prolonged boiling meant it was much safer to drink than water. Alcohol content typically ranged from 1-3%, and given the heavy grain bills common with less efficiently sprouted malt, this weak ale would have been highly nutritious--a major source of B vitamins, among other things.
Something else to add to the conversation courtesy of gruitale.com
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