Gruit:
The long history of flavouring beer with hops is just froth compared with how long we have been brewing: evidence of alcoholic drinks made from fermented grains dates back some 13,000 years. The first documentation of hop cultivation, by contrast, is from just AD 736 in what is now Germany. Before that, to give their drinks flavour, ale brewers used gruit, a mix of bitter herbs, flowers or roots, including dandelion, burdock, sweet gale, mugwort, ground ivy, yarrow, horehound and sage. [“How climate change is shaking up the hops that give beer its flavour,” sidebar: “Rooted in History,” Chris Simms, NewScientist (18 December 2021, paywall)]
