Puncturing the Gruit Myth

<< 2026-05-18 20:01 >>

The gruit house in Bruges, where it's thought that the gruit tax was administered in the 13th and 14th centuries. Wolfgang Staudt, CC BY 2.0.

It's commonly said that "gruit is the beer that was brewed before people started using hops," and it's fascinating how many errors there are in that short, simple sentence. Gruit is one of the most misunderstood areas of beer history, one that even professional historians have messed up, so here is an attempt to clear up the worst confusions.

What was gruit?

Charlemagne, as painted by Albrecht Dürer in 1511, by which time Charlemagne had been dead for seven centuries. What he really looked like is unknown.

The story of gruit in a way begins with Charlemagne, and his proclamation Capitulare de villis issued around 800 CE, where he declares that the right to brew more than for your own needs is now a royal prerogative [1][2]. Earlier, anyone could brew beer for sale any time or place they wanted, but this right was now reserved by the emperor. Of course, Charlemagne was not actually opposed to people brewing. The idea was to use this restriction to squeeze money out of subjects, basically as a form of tax. People now had to be given the right to brew, or they had to purchase it, perhaps with an annual payment, or a one-time payment.

At some point this developed into a system whereby vassals of the crown could be granted a right sometimes called materia cervisae, matter for brewing, and sometimes called gruit. This is documented from 946 onwards, but may well have begun earlier. The word "gruit" first shows up in 998.

Exactly what gruit was at this point is somewhat unclear. For various reasons the idea has been floated that in the early period gruit was malt-based, maybe malt extract, or perhaps some sort of yeast starter. That's probably not the case, however. In later centuries gruit most definitely was a mix of spices used in the beer, since we have documentation of what the mix consisted of.

However, this is not the most important part. The most important part is how gruit was used.

The rule was that every brewer must use a certain proportion of gruit in their beer, and the only place to get gruit was to buy it from whoever had the "gruit right" in the area. This would be whoever had been given or sold the gruit right by the feudal lord. In short, regardless of what gruit contained it was effectively a system for taxing the brewers.

In other words, gruit was not a kind of beer, but a method of taxation.

When and where?

A map of every single place where gruit was known to be used. Based on [3], with some own extensions.

The use of gruit begins some time between 800 and 946, and seems to have ended most places by the 1400s, but it lingered on into the 1600s some places. The history is quite complex, with some towns buying the gruit right from their feudal lord after other towns have stopped using gruit entirely.

As for where, see the map. I used Roel Mulder's helpful blog post listing all locations where gruit is known to have been used [3], and added a couple I found myself. As you can see, it's a very small area, covering basically the Low Countries plus some minor areas around them.

In other words: Gruit was a method of taxation used mainly in the High and Late Middle Ages, in the Low Countries plus tiny nearby bits of Germany and France.

Now we can go back to the claims.

What this means is that hops came into use before gruit, not the other way around. The earliest evidence for hops in beer is over a millennium earlier than the beginning of gruit. Some of the early evidence is shaky, but there is clearly a takeoff around 500 CE [7], which is still centuries before the beginning of gruit.

Was all unhopped beer called gruit? No. In fact, unhopped beer was brewed for at least 12,000 years before gruit came into existence [5]. And even during the gruit era, lots of unhopped non-gruit beer was brewed outside of the tiny gruit area. In fact, unhopped beer continued to be brewed even after gruit ended. In Finland many sahti brewers still don't use hops in their beer. So calling all unhopped beer "gruit" is bizarre, ahistorical, and confusing.

Was gruit a beer style? No. Gruit was an ingredient, not a beer style. Many different kinds of beer used gruit.

It gets even worse, though.

What was in gruit?

Juniper twig with berries on it.

The contents of gruit varied over time and from place to place, but the most common seems to be either bog myrtle or wild rosemary, plus laurel berries and laserwort. Resin was also common. It may have contained some malt or grain. Sometimes it also contained juniper berries, anise, caraway, or hops [1][4].

Yeah, gruit sometimes contained hops. That's another big hole in the popular gruit myth.

I should add that Philipp Overberg has argued that the meaning of the herb names in the records of the various cities are more tricky to interpret that historians have generally assumed [6]. Based on linguistic and archaeological arguments he argues that probably the ingredients of gruit were mainly bog myrtle, caraway, and juniper berries. I don't know if he's right, but if he is it would fit oddly well with evidence from other eras and places.

Conclusion

Gruit was a method of taxation. That tax worked by selling a beer ingredient called gruit, which consisted of spices, and these spices sometimes contained hops. It was only ever used in the Low Countries and small parts of France and Germany in the High and Late Middle Ages.

It's true that gruit (the method of taxation) and gruit beers were eventually displaced by hops. The arrival of hopped beer into the Low Countries caused authorities to switch to more direct methods of taxation [1][2], and brewers switched to using hops in their beer instead of gruit. But, as I wrote above, hops had come into use in brewing in other places long before gruit was invented.

Sources

A good overview is [1], but I recommend the blog posts by Roel Mulder, too.

[1] The rise and fall of gruit, Susan Verberg, Brewery History journal, 174, 46-79, 2018.

[2] Beer in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, Richard W. Unger, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007.

[3] Fact Check: Where Did Gruit Occur?,Roel Mulder, Lost Beers blog post, 2017-07-10.

[4] Gruit: nothing mysterious about it, Roel Mulder, LostBeers.com, 2017-07-13.

[5] Fermented beverage and food storage in 13,000 y-old stone mortars at Raqefet Cave, Israel: Investigating Natufian ritual feasting, Li Liu, Jiajing Wang, Danny Rosenberg, Hao Zhao, György Lengyel, Dani Nadel, Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports, 21, p783-793, 2018.

[6] Grut­bier und Grutkultur in Münster, Philipp Overberg, brau!magazin, herbst 2021.

[7] The history of beer additives in Europe - a review, Vegetation History and Archaeobotany, 8, p35-48, 1999.

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