When Were Hops First Used In Beer? - [UPD] Información de la cerveza

In search of distinctly American beer hops. querbeet / Alamy Beer is a remarkable beverage: a liquid as old as human civilization made of four simple, relatively inexpensive ingredients. It can be made from any grain, in any place. Andean communities, for instance, make beer from corn, root vegetables and fruits, while Japanese make sake—mistakenly identified as wine rather than beer—from fermented rice.

Beer doesn’t belong to a single culture or geographical area. It’s democratic and belongs to everyone. One of the greatest flavor enhancers in beer is hops, often referred to as the “spice” of beer. Brewers use the hop strobiles—the cone-shaped fruits of the plant that contain bitter acids and essential oils commonly known as hops—as a natural preservative and for bittering and aromas ranging from floral to minty.

Hops likely originated in China, but the first documented use was in the 8th century when Benedictine monks used them for brewing in a Bavarian abbey outside of Munich, Germany. Before hops, beer was flavored and preserved with gruit, a combination of heather, mugwort and other locally grown herbs and spices.

The change was a tough sell, author William Bostwick explains in his book, The Brewer’s Tale. He writes, influential Christian mystic and naturalist Hildegard of Bingen is believed to have written, hops “were not very useful. make the soul of man sad, and weigh down his inner organs,” while British physician and beer aficionado Andrew Boorde claimed hops made men fat and bloated.

Fast forward to the 21st century. Today we’re experiencing a “hop rush” and the introduction of beers that are so bitter they exceed 100 IBUs, the maximum amount of bitterness “units” humans can detect. This diversity of hops reflects a diversity of tastes and traditions that are part of an extraordinary evolution in beer—particularly in the United States, where American-style lager once defined beer in much the same way Folgers defined coffee.

In the 1980s and 1990s, the image of American beer, the Brewers Association explains, “was simply that of a mass-produced commodity with little or no character, tradition or culture.” Long before I drank from my first plastic cup of Bud Light, I remember beer marketers imploring beer drinkers to “Lose the carbs, not the taste.” Stores and bars were saturated with light, low-calorie lager and little else.

The light beer explosion helped grow Big Beer and, by the end of the 1970s, industry experts predicted there would soon be only five brewing companies left. (This drop was also rooted in earlier history, a product of Prohibition when more than 800 breweries closed their doors.) As Randy Mosher writes in Tasting Beer: An Insider’s Guide to the World’s Greatest Drink : “The trend toward light, pale beer reached its low point with the introduction of Miller Clear in 1993.

This water-clear beer, stripped of all color and much of its flavor by a carbon filtration process, was, thankfully, a step too far.” Commercial beer, like commercial coffee or chocolate, is about consistency of experience.
We forced the diversity out of our food system,” Brooklyn Brewery brewmaster Garrett Oliver explains, “and we did it on purpose.

It was done for commerce, so that one bland, long-lasting, well-preserved version of almost every food could be sold to us using mass advertising. And, with that, the memory of real food faded.” This is why a Corona—or the Taco Bell 7-layer burrito that might accompany it—tastes the same in Dallas as it does in Seoul. Craft beer is forecasted to grow into an $18 billion industry by 2017. Brent Hofacker / Alamy The two main yeast varieties used in beer also contribute to consistency in flavor. Yeast is what separates the ales from the lagers: Lager yeasts ferment at cooler temperatures and drop to the bottom of the fermenter when they’re done.

Appropriately known as bottom-fermenting yeast, lager yeasts produce clean and crisp beers, like Corona, Heineken, Bud and Pabst Blue Ribbon.
They are considered more commercial because they’re uniform, controllable and don’t produce the depth of flavor we find in ales.
If you want to attract a lot of people, then you make the beer as bland as possible,” says Ben Ott, head brewer at London’s Truman’s Brewery.

That strategy seems to work: Lager is the most popular beer in the world. It makes sense for companies to create beers that appeal to large audiences—and for us, the drinking public, to want something familiar. It’s reassuring to be able to go anywhere in the world and have consistency in our favorite beverage (as the rise of Starbucks attests).

It’s easy and safe. But, in some ways, it’s almost like going nowhere. “What’s better than beer?” one retailer asked. “Cheap beer!” But value is different from price. We’re getting what we pay for. Is cheap beer—inexpensive sameness built on cheap labor and cheaper inputs—really what we want? In today’s rich, complex world of beer, can we reach for something more? That’s what a small group of brewers who had less interest in light lager sameness decided to explore, sparking a taste revolution that has transformed beer culture.

Back in 1980, a burgeoning movement of craft brewers started evolving away from tasteless lagers to beers that more closely resembled European varieties. As Mosher details in Tasting Beer : “The lack of a living beer tradition worth preserving left free to build a new beer culture from scratch.” The primary reason we lost diversity in beer—changing taste preferences—has now become the route to reclaiming it.

This effort included then up-and-coming American brewer Sierra Nevada, which released a hoppy pale ale made with domestic Cascade hops.
Those hops offered a taste of place distinct from European (Old World) hops; they’re genetically unique varieties with very different flavors and stories.
Old World hops are reserved and earthy; they have been grown in Europe for over 1.5 million years and include some of the oldest, most traditional varieties of hops, known as noble hops.

Noble hops are highly aromatic and bring a subtle bitterness to beers; they are as prized and geographically specific as a sparkling wine from the Champagne province in northeast France (the only place that can call its effervescent wine “Champagne”).

Who was the first to use hops in beer?

The modern hop has been developed from a wild plant as ancient as history itself. As far back as the first century AD they were described as a salad plant and are believed to originate from Egypt. Today, the words beer and ale mean much the same, but the word ‘ale’ was originally reserved for brews produced from malt without hops.

This was the original drink of the Anglo-Saxons and English, whereas ‘beer’, a brew using hops, probably originated in Germany. Hops were cultivated in the Low Countries (modern Belgium and Holland) from the 13th century. The cultivation of hops was probably introduced from Flanders to England in the Maidstone area of Kent at the end of the 15th century.

Our national drink until then had been ale, unhopped and sometimes flavoured with herbs such as wormwood. Brewers started to import dried Flemish hops but these contained so much extraneous matter that an Act of Parliament was passed in 1603 imposing penalties on merchants and brewers found dealing in hops adulterated with ‘leaves, stalks, powder, sand, straw and with loggetts of wood dross’. By the 17th century ale (i.e.: un-hopped beer) was no longer popular and beer was the established drink and by 1655 hop cultivation grew rapidly in fourteen counties. In a successful year, an acre of good hops could be more profitable than fifty acres of arable land, but some farmers would not grow hops due to the erratic yields caused by drought, wet periods and mildew.

Duty was imposed in 1710 and the Act prohibited the use of any bettering agent other than hops in beer, as hops were far more wholesome. The duty varied from year to year and speculation on the tax became a popular form of betting. Customers began to ask for a drink that was mixed from two or more casks.

This was a slow process and in 1722 a new beer was brewed that was a combination of three beers. It was an immediate success and became known as ‘porter’ due to its popularity with London labourers and porters. This was the first beer that was ideal for mass production and massive investment was required.

Immense profits could be made and porter brewing spread throughout the country.
Paler beer was coming into fashion in 1750 with the middle class and to prevent fraud, a further Act was passed requiring the bags or ‘pockets’ in which the hops were packed to be stencilled with the year, place of growth and the grower’s name; a tradition that continues to this day.

By the 19th century, it was the golden age of the hop industry. Hop acreage continued to increase until 1878 when it reached its peak with 77,000 acres. Tastes changed and a decline in the demand for porter and a surging demand for a lighter beer known as Indian Ale or Pale Ale became fashion. Transporting Hop Pockets Twenty-three years later and acreage had fallen to 16,500. The producer-controlled Hops Marketing Board was created to control the flailing industry. The Board would negotiate a guaranteed price with the growers and the brewers would indicate their expected demand to the Board, resulting in allocated quotas to each grower.

This brought stability and by 1968 acreage had slowly increased to 17,900 acres. However, in 1982 EEC rules led to its disbanding and the introduction of independent producer groups for the marketing of English hops. The hop industry was soon to face further problems as Lager gained in popularity and fewer hops were required.

In addition, the seeded hops produced in the UK were purported by competing countries to be of inferior quality. This has been disproved but the myth caused considerable damage to the British hop industry. Formerly, hops were grown in almost every region of the UK but they are now confined largely to the West Midlands and South Eastern counties of England.

Because a huge itinerant force of workers was needed to pick the crop by hand, production became concentrated near to the industrial areas of London, South Wales and the West Midlands where the working-class families were glad to be able to spend their annual holidays in the countryside. Click on the link, to view a short film about families of hop workers in 1959 on holiday for the summer and working in the hop yards.

Twentieth century advances in production and mechanical harvesting have eliminated the need for large numbers of seasonal workers. In 1922 the first hop-picking machine to be used in this country was imported from America by a Worcester grower. Machine picking was not to become widely practiced until the late 1950s as the American machines were not suited to conditions in England and hand pickers were still available.

However, when the change came, it was the West Midlands growers who led the way. The first British-made picking machine was produced in Martley in 1934 and the two main makes were manufactured in Suckley and Malvern. Britain’s brewers in the 21st century require a comprehensive portfolio of hops ranging from the low alpha acids of around 4% to higher alphas nearer 20%, as well as being increasingly interested in the individual flavours of each hop variety.

There will always be increasing interest in individual flavours of each hop variety and a need to develop economical hops that are more resistant to disease and requiring lower chemical inputs. Horticulture Research International at Wye College in Kent joined with England’s hop growers in the 1980’s to anticipate this need and to develop the new category of hops called Hedgerows. These answer many of the above problems, as hedgerow hops only grow to 8 feet rather than the ‘traditional’ 20 feet, are cheaper to establish, can be harvested at speed by machine, require less chemical input and provide a wonderful playground for beneficial bugs and insects.

Today with almost no Government support, the development of new varieties continues apace. In 2007, when the Wye College hop development programme was closed down, the British Hop Association (formerly National Hop Association) created a subsidiary company called Wye Hops to continue driving the British Hop industry forward.

For other information on the history of hops and their development, take a look at The Brewing Society’s website,

When did people add hops to beer?

As any IPA fan will tell you, hops are an essential ingredient in modern-day beer. Hops – the female flowers of the female flower of the humulus lupulus plant – give beer distinctive aromas and hints of bitterness, and they also act as a natural preservative.

When were hops first used in beer in the UK?

BRITISH BEER HISTORY & British Beer Styles – Nowadays ale and beer are interchangeable terms but in Britain it was not always so. Ale was made with malted barley, flavoured with herbs and spices but no hops, while beer was a malted barley drink with added hops bestowing a refreshing bitterness consumed in continental Europe.

The first record of hopped beer in Blighty was circa 1362 imported from Amsterdam into Great Yarmouth. The earliest mention of beer being brewed in England (from imported hops) was 1412, made by a German alewife in Colchester. Cultivation of hops started around 1520 when humulus lupulus was planted in Kent.

But ale drinking by English men and women was not to be abandoned easily and both ale and beer continued to be brewed and consumed as distinctly different beverages. No-one knows when unhopped ale ceased being popular – possibly the 18th century – in favour of the hopped beer that came to dominate brewing.

It is also not clear when hopped beer started to be referred to as ‘ale’.
Britain’s (or England as it was before the countries of Scotland and England were legally united in 1707) increasing influence overseas from the 17 th century and vast trading network spread the demand for beer and introduced it to parts of the world where it had not previously been.

Ships carried beer as a source of drinking water, for daily rations to keep the crew content, as ballast on ships, and as a trading commodity. From the founding of the East India Company in 1600, the first English settlement in Virginia in 1607, Australia’s penal colony in Botany Bay in 1788, to Guyana in 1796 English/British ships carried beer to all hemispheres.

More styles of beer first brewed in Britain are now brewed overseas than those of any other brewing nation.
These include India Pale Ale, Pale Ale, Porter, Stout, Imperial Russian Stout, Mild, Bitter, Barley Wine, Brown Ale, and Scotch Ale.
Click below for a guide to beer styles that are recognised as British – first brewed in Britain or most associated with Britain.

Beer is the most convivial of all drinks. It has a magical ability to bring people together and bond them. It soothes and makes us happy. It provides us with safe water and soluble nutrition. To quote a phrase attributed to 16th century Swiss Physician Paracelus ‘ Cerevisia malorum.

What was used before hops in beer?

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Beer brewed following a 13th-century recipe using gruit herbs Gruit (alternately grut or gruyt ) is a herb mixture used for bittering and flavouring beer, popular before the extensive use of hops, The terms gruit and grut ale may also refer to the beverage produced using gruit.

Did Vikings use hops in beer?

An Archaic Frosted Barley Pop – Anyone cooking from the Libellus would have had Viking-style beer to drink with their meals. The first notable difference between Viking beer and most modern home brewing is that Vikings used wild yeast, which any home chef can capture.

They didn’t use hops at this point, either,” Dr.
Albala said.
More common was a mixture of herbs called ‘gruit,’ and it’s actually the same word as ‘kraut’ which means just vegetables.
It would usually contain mugwort—that’s Artemisia vulgaris, which is a bitter and acts as a preservative.” Unlike the average can of store-bought beer, Vikings would often add a hallucinogen called henbane to their beer mix.

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In larger doses, henbane is poisonous, and even fatal, making it inadvisable for the modern home brew. “Another thing to keep in mind is this was not the light lager we’re familiar with, which is bottom-fermented in a cold cellar; this is actually top-fermented, meaning the yeast will be floating on top; so, we would call this ale,” Dr.

Did ancient beer contain hops?

Ingredients – Then: The most noticeable absence in ancient Egyptian beer is hops, as these were not in use until the medieval period. The grain, too, is different, as ancient grain would have been higher in protein and predates modern varieties of wheat and barley.

For our ancient Egyptian beer we used emmer, the earliest precursor to modern wheat.
It was widely grown in the Fertile Crescent and has been identified by Delwen Samuel and her team on brewery excavations in the ancient workers’ village of Amarna, built in 1350 BC.
Although beer was not routinely made using dates or other flavourings, we decided to present a possible version of a royal brew.

Spices and sweetness were a mark of status and I believe that the royal brewery would have been likely to create a more luxurious beer for its illustrious consumers. We paid a visit to the organic store at the British Museum, where we were able to see 5,000-year-old examples of emmer, barley, pomegranates, figs and other edible offerings.

Inspired by the experience, we added an Egyptian-style spice mix called dukkah to the brew. Our blend consisted of rose petals, pistachios (the resin of which was also used in Egyptian embalming), sesame seeds, coriander and cumin seed. This is also influenced by the aromatic resins and garlands used in ancient Egyptian funeral preparations.

We also tried adding dates, to further enrich the brew and help the wild yeast, as the sugars speed up the fermentation. Now: All modern beers are made with barley unless they specify otherwise. Hops are a near permanent feature, and flavourings are widespread and experimental.

From Earl Grey tea to bacon, we love a flavoured beer – there’s even one with snake’s venom! To look back on it now, the Egyptian method makes a fool of modern brewers. We have added so many steps to improve on ancient methods, but our trial illustrates that ancient Egyptian beer ferments faster and is materially more efficient.

Working without thermometers and starch tests, without the microbiology of yeast and enzyme conversion, the ancient Egyptian brewers created a crisp refreshing beer, that could have been made continuously in huge volumes. It is amazing that one can look back and assume the ancient knowledge was lacking in some way.

Perhaps there wasn’t a need to store beer for long periods? Perhaps there was a perfectly good method of extending the shelf life of a beer that we have not found evidence of.
But I think it is a mistake to look back into history and assume it was in more primitive or less extraordinary than what we can produce today.

Watch the full process, meet the team and find out more about our experiment in the video: How to make 5,000 year old beer – Pleasant Vices Tasha Marks is a food historian, artist and the founder of AVM Curiosities, With thanks to Michaela Charles, Brewer at the Beerblefish Brewing Company, a nd Susan Boyle, Beer and Wine Consultant at Two Sisters Brewing,

Did medieval ale have hops?

(designed and brewed by Tofi Kerthjalfadsson, Sept.23rd – Dec.28th, 1998) – In medieval England, ale was an alcoholic drink made from grain, water, and fermented with yeast. The difference between medieval ale and beer was that beer also used hops as an ingredient.

Virtually everyone drank ale. It provided significant nutrition as well as hydration (and inebriation). The aristocracy could afford to drink wine some of the time as well, and some times the poor could not even afford ale, but in general ale was the drink of choice in England throughout the medieval period.

These recipes are a modest attempt to recreate ales that are not only “period”, i.e. pre-17th century, but is actually medieval. These ales are based on newly available evidence from the late 13th and early 14th centuries. Not only was beer significantly different some three hundred years ago, in 1700, in comparison to today, ale was significantly different around 1300 than either ale or beer was in 1600.

The primary reason for this difference in the product is a seemingly small difference in technique: for an ale, the wort, the liquid containing sugars and protein extracted from the grain, was not boiled prior to fermenting. For a beer, the wort had to be boiled with the hops. This seemingly small difference was in fact a change in technology that had long-reaching consequences for the preservation, as well as taste and nutritional value of the beer.

To make these ales I’ve tried to use only medieval techniques and appropriate equipment. I have not used the most egregiously modern tool, the thermometer. The first batch I did not even measured my results with a hydrometer (a tool used by modern brewers to measure the quantity of sugars dissolved in a liquid).

The efficiency of a batch – the extent to which starches in the grains have been turned into sugars disolved in the liquid – can be measured with this tool.
Also by comparing the hydrometer measurement from prior to fermentation with the post-fermentation measurement, the alcohol content of a brew can be deduced.

Although I did measure the results of the second batch with a hydrometer, I did not adjust or an any other way alter this batch on the basis of these measurements. First I will present the main sources for these recipes, then my actual recipes for these ales, and finally a discussion of the recipes.

This discussion starts with a brief summary of ale and ale brewing in medieval England, and then discusses my choices of ingredients, the quantities and proportions involved, and finally the methods used to make the ales. This discussion section is critical to the appreciation of the recipe, since some of the methods differ substantially from modern, or even 16th-17th C.

beer brewing methods.

Are all beers made with hops?

Beer Fundamentals – What are hops? – Allagash Brewing Company The four main ingredients in beer are malt, water, yeast, and hops. And though many people get excited about hoppy beers, many might not understand what exactly a hop is. Hops are the flowers, or cones, of a plant called Humulus lupulus, Hops help to keep beer fresher, longer; help beer retain its head of foam—a key component of a beer’s aroma and flavor; and, of course, add “hoppy” aroma, flavor, and bitterness. A view of Aroostook Hops, a farm up in Westfield, Maine. Every single beer on the market today contains hops. If they didn’t, they would be a “gruit” which is basically a beer that, instead of hops, uses witches-brew-sounding herbs like bog myrtle, yarrow, heather, or juniper.

Sidenote: bitterness can also come from fruits, herbs, and even vegetables added to the beer.
For example: pith from orange zest, spruce tips, juniper, and more.
Hops are divided into two very general varieties: bittering and aroma.
Bittering hops will have higher alpha acids, making them more economical for bittering beer (a small amount goes a long way).

Aroma hops will tend to have more essential oils. It’s those highly volatile essential oils that contribute much of what people understand as “hoppiness.” We’re talking aromas like citrus, pine, mango, resin, melon, and more. By adding hops early in the brewing process, all of those essential oils volatize (boil away), either during the boil or during fermentation. We’ve written a couple blogs about more specific topics around hops like, and, Click the links to check those out. The use of hops varies greatly depending on the beer, and what the brewer is looking for. And it’s this variety of uses that makes hops such a delicious and versatile ingredient to brew with. : Beer Fundamentals – What are hops? – Allagash Brewing Company

How did hops end up in beer?

The history of beer brewing is fascinating; especially how it developed in the USA. Starting with Puritans sending hops to the colony of pilgrims at Plymouth Rock to the heydays of Detroit brewers after Prohibition. I encourage you to search out on the Internet and learn more about our hertitage of beer brewing.

It doesn’t seem to matter what your individual hertitage or ethnicity is; somewhere in your ancestory beer making is involved.
Check it out! Following is a very, very condensed version of the history of beer that only briefly covers a few aspects of how beer ever came to be in the first place.
Did you ever wonder how Hops ended up in beer? The answer may surprise you.

Nowdays, hops are added to beer mainly to create specific bitterness and flavors, but this was not always the focus. Hops have unique antimicrobial properties and they act as a preservative. In past history, when there was no refrigeration, steam pasteurization, or hermetically-sealed processes, hops were added to fermenting grains to inhibit the bad bacterias and fungi that would create deadly poisonous brews.

Drinking beer was high risk activity- you might get drunk; you might get dead! Men who could successfully brew batch after batch of brew that didn’t kill you were called “masters” and were very respected. You can bet they carefully guarded their brewing recipes! (Believe it or not, religious monks had some of the best recipes!) Beer that tasted good didn’t come into the picture until later.

Brew masters took note that hop cones from some plants brewed a more palatable beer than others, and started selecting specific female hop plants for cultivation. This selection process was very regional; Germans selected their favorite plants, Englishmen picked theirs, etc and so on.

Each region developed beers with flavors that have become classics – German Pilsners, English Stouts, Scottish Ales, All this history has led to today. Cross-breeding and creating new Hop varieties is leading to a craft brewing explosion of new beers with totally new flavors and profiles. New combinations of hops and malted grains used with new brewing techniques create new brews daily.

I hope this has piqued your interest and get you to investigate further. There is some really cool info out there that should not be forgotten!

Did Romans use hops?

We are still in the midst of a craft beer revolution here in the U.S. The movement champions smaller, more local breweries, but the beer itself is often characterized by a specific ingredient: hops. The demand is so high for hoppy beers like IPA that there was recently anxiety over whether the hops farmers can even keep up.

Relax, hop-o-philes, these perennials probably won’t run out, but do keep in mind that Roman beer drinkers never had the pleasure of a hoppy ending in their pint. The rise of the hop is a medieval development, though even at that time their use was controversial. Hops grow at Crossroads Farm near to Coburg, Oregon.

(Image via Wikimedia Images, under CC-BY-SA-3.0, license). Although modern brewers and beer fanatics may be crazy for the bitter taste provided by hops (and for those never-ending hops puns on beer labels), Roman brewers, called cervesarii, did not use them during brewing.

Greeks viewed hops as a wild plant and Romans used them more as an herb or perhaps a vegetable, both for flavoring and for some medicinal purposes.
In the same manner that white beers are associated with Bavaria and porters with Britain, different areas around the ancient Mediterranean had various types of brews.

In Egypt, we know that the there was a barley-based libation that tasted more like a barley wine or an ale, which was called zythos. Egyptians also brewed a beer from emmer, and had been brewing since about 3500 BCE, It was a popular beverage that was often heavily taxed, and some breweries could get quite large.

A brewery at Hierakonpolis produced up to 1,200 liters per week.
The Midas Touch is a “sweet yet dry” barley beer from Delaware brewery Dogfish Head, which has a,
Series of ancient ales.
They worked with archaeologist Pat McGovern to reconstruct a 2,700 year old recipe from ancient Turkey (Image via Bernt Rostad, Flickr.

CC-BY-2.0). Despite its prevalence in the Near East since about the fourth millenium BCE, elite Greeks and Romans largely looked down upon beer as the beverage of the “barbarian.” Just as we do today, certain beverages were connected to national identity and to socio-economic status.

Roman writers largely convey the idea that civil Romans sipped fine wines and used olive oil, while the “barbarian” cultures to their north (e.g., Celts, Germans) drank beer called cervesia and milk.
Why, these barbarians even used butter.
Northern brews often had a hefty amount of herbs and spices in them rather than hops.

Strainers were a must. A copper Etruscan drink strainer and funnel from the 6th c. BCE. Strainers were often used to filter, wine (as this one probably was), but equally could be used to strain beer (Strainer is at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond.

Image via the author).
Wooden tablets from the fort of Vindolanda along Hadrian’s wall even give us the names of ancient brewers and malters working in Roman Britain.
Military bases were a common place for brewers to set up shop and thrive; soldiers were thirsty customers.
Numerous inscriptions indicate that brewers also lived alone the Rhine river in modern Germany and likely shipped beer in wooden barrels made by barrel-makers referred to as cuparii- where we get the modern “cooper.” This beer shipped along the Rhine or in Roman Britain would need to have been drank rather quickly due to far fewer preservatives to keep it fresh.

So-called “Cupa burials” were a fashionable tombstone in Roman Spain for a time. These markers are, shaped like barrels, as is this one from Beja in modern Portugal. In Spain, there were special beers brewed called caelia and cerea (Image via Wikimedia under a CC-BY-2.0 license).

We must go to the Carolingians in order to find hops in beer. As historian Richard Unger points out, in 768, during the reign of Pepin the Short (Charlemagne’s father), the king gifted humlonariae (probably hop gardens) to the abbey of St. Denis. It is likely that monks in the early 9th century began to use hops cultivated in their hops gardens for the beer made at the monastery.

Although hops gave this beer flavor, it had added value as a preservative. Beer with hops could now last up to 6 months, and thus could be shipped in larger batches over farther distances than in classical antiquity. A flight of local Iowa brews (Image and onerous beer tasting research done by the author).

Hops continued to grow and to be used in beers, but also to cause controversy. The abbess Saint Hildegard of Bingen mentions their use in beer and for medicinal purposes in the 12th century, indicating that their benefits were quite known by the High Middle Ages. In 1380, the archbishop of Cologne outlawed hopped beers from Westphalia in an effort to promote the use of his own gruit in brews.

In 1530, Henry VIII also tried to stop the use of hops, preferring to maintain the standard of “Good old English ale.” As these late medieval and early modern references attest to, the argument over hoppy beers is not unique. Sure, hops preserve beer longer, but not everyone loves their bitter taste.

Are hops in German beer?

Beer in Germany Major part of German culture A Kranz (wreath) of fresh that is typically carried by a server (“Köbes”), containing traditional Stange glasses and, in the center, larger modern glasses (German: Bier ) is a major part of, German beer is according to the, which permits only water,, and as ingredients; and stipulates that beers not exclusively using barley-malt, such as, must be,

What are the oldest hops in the world?

Hops growing up a house wall in Voss, Norway. One of the biggest mysteries in the history of beer is where and when people started using hops in beer. We still don’t really know the answer, but we do know some things, and what we know is quite different from the history of hops as most people understand it.

So I wanted to straighten out the record a little bit. But before we get into that, let’s set the context. Hops have been growing wild in Europe for a very long time. Once the glaciers retreated after the last Ice Age, hops seem to have spread northwards to cover most of the continent. In Sweden hop pollen has been found already from 9000 BCE.

Because of climatic changes hops may at times have retreated southwards again, but overall hops appear to have covered most of the continent. There are also early signs of hop cultivation in Norway, from around 500 BCE, and signs of it growing wild well before that.

Today hops grow wild in Scandinavia up to the Arctic Circle and beyond. So it’s clear that hops grew across most of Europe long before beer brewing even began. Ireland appears to be an exception, One striking thing I learned from analysing beer herb finds in archaeology was that the most popular herbs in northern European brewing appear to have remained the same from prehistoric times up to aboout 1900, at least in farmhouse brewing.

Juniper is one example, and Myrica gale would be another. It does seem, however, that hops were not used in beer in the earliest period of beer brewing. There are a number of early beer finds in Denmark and Sweden from around 2800 BCE to 200 CE that have been carefully analyzed to see what ingredients were used, and none of them show any sign of hops.

So while hops were available brewers seem not to have used them.
And apparently the biggest change in herb use in beer is the introduction of hops, and its later almost complete dominance (outside of farmhouse ale).
So when and where did brewers start using hops? Martyn Cornell has done great work presenting what I think is the generally shared view: the first documented instance of hops in beer is from northern France in 822, from a statute written by the abbot of Corbie.

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Wikipedia has a very similar story. This, however, is the history you get from written documents, but hop usage began at a time when brewing was mostly something people did at home, for their own household, and almost none of what they did was ever recorded in writing. Map showing the words for hops in various languages, with colours to indicate their origin. From a tweet by Øystein Hellesøe Brekke. One place to turn is linguistics, where we find that of the words for hops, those of Slavic origin completely dominate eastern and northern Europe, and are used in the Nordic languages as well as Turkic and Finnic languages.

Words with the same origin show up in Flemish dialects in Belgium as well as in Old English, so the Slavic dominance is greater than what the map is able to show.
Exactly why is not clear at all.
The best place to turn is to archaeology, which is able to shed light on places and ages from which we have no written evidence at all.

By far the best thing written on the early history of hops is Behre 1999, but it’s now more than 20 years out of date, and the archaeology of beer has moved very quickly since then. So it’s high time for an update. And as expected archaeology has been able to cast a rather surprising light on periods that the written evidence does not cover. Map showing archaeological finds of hops thought to be remains of use in beer brewing. The dots are shaded according to the age of the find. As you can see from the map, the oldest find of hops thought to derive from beer brewing is from nothern Italy, dated to about 550 BCE.

That’s almost 1400 years before the abbot of Corbie. The find is from Pombia, where a beaker with dried-up remains of a drink were found in a grave. Analysis of the remains found pollen from cereals, trees, and hops. In other words, this was a hopped beer. So did brewing of hopped beer begin in northern Italy in 550 BCE? Look at the map again.

See how few dots there are? There are so few brewing-related archaeological finds at all that we know almost nothing. (There are more finds than what this map shows — this is just the archaeological reports I’ve been able to unearth over the years.) Brewing of hopped beer could have started 2000 years earlier 2000 km away from Pombia without anyone knowing. Map showing archaeological finds of beer brewing where we have some idea of the herbs used, shaded to indicate whether or not hops were found. Ignore the black dots in Sweden: those are mainly from the 17th century onwards. The black dots in Denmark we already talked about: those are the very early beer finds.

The interesting ones are the one in the Czech Republic, Kladina 900 BCE, and in Italy, Verucchio 700 BCE. So it does look like using hops in beer before 1 CE was relatively unusual. The evidence is thin enough, however, that even that is a pretty shaky conclusion. One thing about the Pombia find that may surprise some: this brewer was a Celt, probably belonging to the Hallstatt culture,

This find is from before the Romans conquered this part of Italy, or indeed much of anything at all. Once the Romans did start expanding they called this part of what is now Italy Gallia Cisalpina, that is, Gaul on this side of the Alps. Eventually all of present-day Italy became wine country, but that was later. Hops growing on a pole at Lithuanian national museum, Rumšiškės. The two oldest finds are from Aalen-Hofherrenweiler, roughly 250 CE, and Langenau, roughly 330 CE. And while these are the “next” finds, they are eight centuries or more after the Pombia find, which gives you some idea of how sparse the record actually is.

Both finds are from villages where remains of hops and grain were found together. That makes it likely that the hops were used in brewing, but it’s somewhat uncertain. (And what else did they find, besides hops? That’s right. Juniper. As I’ve written before, juniper use in beer seems to go back to the beginning of beer brewing in Europe.) Much more definitive, however, is the third find, from Trossingen, roughly 580 CE, where a wooden bottle with dried up remains was found in a grave that also contained a musical instrument, leading it to be dubbed “the singer’s grave”.

Analysis of the remains found pollen from cereals and hops. So people in this area definitely used hops in their beer. The fourth find, Pfettrach, is fairly late by our standards, 850 CE, and the connection with beer is somewhat uncertain, but it does provide further indication that people in this area were brewing hopped beer at the time.

The German finds are all from Germanic peoples, who at that time had newly arrived in these areas from the north.
In other words it’s very possible that Celtic people from the Hallstatt culture were brewing hopped beer here, too, before the Germans arrived.
The Germans may have adopted the use of hops from these Celts.

None of this necessarily means that the Celts were the first to use hops in beer, or that the use of hops in beer began around the Alps, but it’s quite suggestive to see such a concentration of early hop finds. However, it’s entirely possible that we’ll find evidence of even earlier hop use somewhere else in the future. Hops in the wort, ready to boiled, Shitovo, Russia. The next set of finds is from what we might call the viking world, since they date from that era and are from regions dominated by the vikings at the time. In order:

Ribe, Denmark, 725 Kaupang, Norway, 825 York, UK, 875 Birka, Sweden, 875 Staraya Ladoga, Russia, 925 Järrestad, Sweden, 925

All of these are finds of hops together with grain, so none are definitive, but there are so many of them that it seems safe to conclude that it wasn’t unusual among the vikings to use hops in beer. Note also the southernmost black dot in Sweden: that’s Blackeberg, 975 CE, so it seems there were also viking beers without hops, which shouldn’t surprise anyone.

When the Viking Age started the peoples of Scandinavia suddenly started travelling far more outside Scandinavia, probably at least in part because they started using sails on their ships. So it could be that this was a time when their contact with peoples further south expanded substantially, and they adopted the use of hops from them at this time.

That’s just a guess, but it does fit with the earlier absence of hops from beer finds in the same area. Martyn Cornell wrote a great piece on the Graveney boat hop find, which is the southernmost of the two dots in the UK. In a sunken boat a very large amount of hops was found, so large it’s assumed it must have made up a proportion of the cargo.

It’s been seen as something of an archaeological mystery, because we know that British commercial brewers were brewing unhopped beer up until the 15th century, while the Graveney boat is from roughly 950.
However, the find of hops in York from around 875 shows that probably people were brewing beer with hops in Yorkshire at the time.

Which means the hops on the Graveney boat may well have been destined for brewing, and it’s probably less of a mystery than it seemed when it was excavated in the 1970s. But if people were brewing beer with hops in the UK in the viking era, why was 15th century ale unhopped? Well, we don’t know how common hop use was. Hop garden, Sõru, Estonia. A key point here is that while to our minds hops are an ingredient that’s crucial for getting bitter flavour and protection from infection, those two things require boiling. And as far as we know, historically beer was not boiled until quite late.

Martyn Cornell dug up a British description of brewing from the 13th century that describes raw ale, for example. ( Much more about raw ale and the introduction of boiling in my book,) This means that further back in time, the use of hops very likely did not have the effects we’re used to it having today.

That is, the benefits of hop usage were much less before boiling than they became after. What this means is that while people were probably using hops in beer in England already in the 9th century, hops were probably not seen as something that must be included in every beer.

Hops may even have gone out of use in England before the 13th century for all we know. As Richard Unger describes it, it’s only from the late 13th century onwards that boiling hops in the wort becomes common in north Germany, and hopped beer really begins to to take over. The later British conflict between brewers of hopped and unhopped beer is probably a consequence of this development crossing the channel to England.

The evidence is quite flimsy, but it may be that the beginning of hop usage should be understood as having two phases. First one phase where hops were coming into use, but just as one beer herb among many, and then later a phase where hops were combined with boiling, and this combination then took over.

It’s really the second phase that corresponds to hop usage as we know it.
What is very clear, however, is that brewers started using hops long before the time indicated by documentary evidence.
And what about the dominance of Slavic words for hops? That doesn’t quite fit this history, but on the other hand there’s very little evidence either way from Slavic-speaking areas.

Basically we’re not at a point where the archaeological evidence is firm enough that we can connect it with the linguistic data. However, beer archaeology has been making huge advances over the last years, and so it’s likely more pieces will be falling into place over the years to come.

And who knows what we might find then. The earliest beer find in Europe is from Hornstaad/Hörnle 1A, by Lake Constance on the border with Switzerland, dated 3910 BCE. Starch analysis showed grain had been malted and fermented. Those people also had hops, because in the 1980s hop remains were found in a well in the same village.

But did they use the hops in beer? There’s no reason to assume they did, but they certainly could have, and it’s also in the area around the Alps. Hop garden, Busemarke, Denmark.

Are any beers made without hops?

Brewers are ditching hops and substituting botanicals like yerba mate, redwood tips and French Laundry herbs – This is a carousel. Use Next and Previous buttons to navigate 1 of 2 The Morpho ale from Woods Beer & Wine Co. is made with yerba mate, bay leaves and hibiscus. Carlos Avila Gonzalez/The Chronicle 2019 Craft beer is so closely associated with big, hoppy flavors that the idea of making beer without hops might sound impossible. But hops, a.k.a. the flowering cones of the Humulus lupulus, are actually a relatively recent introduction in brewing. Until the 17th century, hops weren’t allowed in English ales, and Germany didn’t require hops in its official brewing laws until 1906.

For many centuries, a vast majority of the beer made around the world used other spices and botanicals for flavor.
That kind of botanical beer is called a gruit (pronounced groo-it).
Though they fell into obscurity, gruits are now making a comeback among Bay Area craft breweries.
Local brewers are forgoing hops in favor of redwood tips, yerba mate, chamomile tea, even herbs from the French Laundry ‘s famous gardens, resulting in beers that can express their places of origin while introducing a whole new range of flavors.

It’s easy to imagine that these gruits will taste medicinal, like a fermented green juice, but what’s harder to visualize is the subtlety of flavor and depth they can have. Without having to build a recipe around one ingredient, hops, these beers can go in many more directions.

They may taste beer-like with a subtle citrus flavor, like an herbal iced tea or something closer to wine.
Innovative flavors aren’t anything new.
Craft brewing has already seen a vast number of novel styles in recent years, like pastry stouts and smoothie sours.
Even established varieties like the IPA have seen the emergence of new sub-categories, like milkshake, hazy, brut and New England.

The resurgence of gruits now seems poised to join these trends expanding the scope of what beer can taste like. Brewer Brian Hunt of Moonlight Brewing in Santa Rosa started experimenting with gruits based on an interest in beer history. Ramin Rahimian/Special to The Chronicle 2018 “If you look at the demand that we have in our beers today, it’s all one plant,” says Brian Hunt, owner and founder at Moonlight Brewing, of hops.

Moonlight makes a gruit with redwood branch tips called Working for Tips.
What if we had 100, or even 50 different species to play with? Can you imagine what explosions we’d have in flavors?” Working for Tips evolved after Hunt learned that miners in California used pine trees to flavor their beer when they couldn’t get hops.

He knew that evergreen foliage, specifically spruce, was used in place of hops in Scandinavia. Having some Scandinavian heritage, Hunt set out to explore this concept. Staying true to the spirit of the gruit beer that uses what’s available nearby, Hunt scouted for botanicals near the brewery in Santa Rosa rather than order spruce tips from elsewhere.

He ultimately chose redwood.
The little tips are perfect about the end of May, otherwise it tastes more like a Christmas tree,” says Hunt, who says the redwood gives the gruit a citrusy taste.
Working for Tips tastes like beer, with evergreen and citrus flavors common in hopped beers, and yet it doesn’t.

It has a levity to it that is difficult to parse out, but the interplay of malt and redwood are perfectly balanced. “I figured it was only a matter of time until the American craft brewing scene embraced these unconventional ingredients,” says Jim Woods, CEO at Woods Beer & Wine Co,, which has taprooms throughout the Bay Area.

He produces two gruits: Local Honey, flavored with eucalyptus, lavender and yarrow, along with honey from Marshall Farms in Napa County; and Morpho, brewed with yerba mate, bay leaves and hibiscus.
The function of botanicals in gruits is not to mimic the taste of hops but to add new flavors.
The Local Honey is herbaceous and almost resiny, with floral aromas and just enough honeyed sweetness to balance a slight, verdant bitterness.

The Morpho tastes tart with hibiscus, leaning more tropical. Using local botanicals, like Moonlight ‘s Santa Rosa redwood tips or Woods’ Napa Valley honey, is also a way for brewers to convey a sense of place. Mad Fritz Brewing Co. in St. Helena makes several different gruits using local botanicals, including herbs from the French Laundry gardens. Erik Castro/Special to The Chronicle 2020 “The freedom to use what is available and see what it does, spending time and interacting with other farmers to discover new ideas, as well as making a beer that doesn’t taste like anything else, is certainly inspiring,” says Nile Zacherle, owner of Mad Fritz Brewing in Napa.

You might be interested: What Is The Alcohol In White Claw?

Zacherle sources locally for his gruits, going so far as to make some of his own malt. He gets herbs within biking distance of his brewery, which includes the gardens at the French Laundry, from which he has made several thyme-geranium gruits. He’s used chrysanthemum flowers, rose hips, mustard flowers, rhubarb and hibiscus from the Restaurant at Meadowood to make a gruit that’s similar to a saison.

For an herbal, savory gruit, he’s gathered wild sage, bay laurel and redwood tips from the Napa Valley mountains. The gruits from Mad Fritz are subtle and balanced, and while you might imagine the flavor of veggie broth, what you get is closer to an herbal white wine.

The effervescence is light with hints of herbs, citrus and an herbal bitterness. These beers are refreshing on their own, but they really make sense when paired with something like a local cheese. Some of these brewers became interested in gruits because of a fascination with beer history. Hunt, of Moonlight, credits the 1998 publication of “Sacred and Herbal Healing Beers” by Stephen Harrod Buhner with helping him understand the gruit tradition.

Similarly, Zacherle has a penchant for making beers according to recipes that would have been used in the 11th to 13th centuries. But some breweries, like Ale Industries in Oakland, started making gruits for a different reason: In the late 2000s, there was a hops shortage and prices for that ingredient skyrocketed. Working for Tips, a beer made with locally sourced redwood tips instead of hops, at Moonlight’s taproom in Santa Rosa. Ramin Rahimian/Special to The Chronicle 2018 “The economics just didn’t make sense, so we set out to find a style that could be produced without hops,” says Ale Industry’s brewmaster, Morgan Cox, who started developing what would become one of the biggest sellers in their taproom, a beer called Golden State of Mind.

Golden State of Mind starts with a grain base of California barley, wheat and oats, which gets brewed with coriander, chamomile and orange peel. The gruit is light, with an almost citrus iced-tea quality. That base gets combined with fresh organic cherry juice for a second gruit called Cherry Kush. It is in essence working off the idea of a shandy, which combines beer with a citrus soda.

It’s a style that invites endless creativity. “We haven’t scratched the surface of what we can do in brewing,” Hunt says. Lou Bustamante is a Bay Area freelance writer. Email: [email protected] Twitter: @thevillagedrunk

Does Heineken have hops?

Our Heineken® lager contains three main ingredients: malted barley, hop extract and water. When our Heineken A-Yeast® is added, this is when Heineken® magically transforms into the brew we all know and love.

Do Belgian beers use hops?

What Malt and Hops – The great thing about Belgian beers are their simplicity most use just a handful of ingredients and the hard part is getting the right balance of malt and hops. The one thing you will need to consider though is your yeast strain that you use.

This is something you don’t want to save on as the yeast plays a huge part in the Belgian styles. Malt : Pilsner malt is one of the most widely used in all the above beers making up the bulk of the grist. Other malts that are also common to all the above beers are Munich and Vienna malt as well as their caramelised variaties, caramunich and caravienna.

Of course other types of grains will be in certain beers such as wheat in Saison but the Pilsner malt with some other aromatic is the most common. Hops : Styrian Goldings, Saaz and Tettnang are typical to all the styles. There is a strong emphasis on local hops (to Belgium) obviously but also hops like Fuggles and East Kent Goldings are used frequently too.

Has Guinness got hops in it?

Nutrition facts – It’s estimated that a 12-ounce (355-ml) serving of Guinness Original Stout provides ( 4 ):

Calories: 125 Carbs: 10 grams Protein: 1 gram Fat: 0 grams Alcohol by volume (ABV): 4.2% Alcohol: 11.2 grams

Given that beer is made from grains, it’s naturally rich in carbs, However, many of its calories also come from its alcohol content since alcohol provides 7 calories per gram ( 5 ). In this case, the 11.2 grams of alcohol in 12 ounces (355 ml) of Guinness contribute 78 calories, which accounts for roughly 62% of its total calorie content.

Does Guinness use hops?

We’ve got bonds with farmers spanning three generations – It all begins with barley grains, which are malted and form the foundation of our beer. It’s not an easy grain to grow. That is why we have links with farmers that span three generations. This malted barley forms the foundation of our beer, carefully crushed by our brew house mills and then mixed with water from the Poulaphouca Lake in County Wicklow. It’s now that our unique dark-roasted barley comes into play. The precision of the roasting process is what gives our famous stout its distinctive rich taste and dark, ruby-red hue. Raise your pint to the light and you’ll see how it glows.232 degrees Celsius.

That’s the temperature that transforms our barley into a black state of perfection.
That’s the temperature that makes GUINNESS taste like GUINNESS.
Any cooler and the beer won’t be as flavourful, any hotter and the barley catches fire.
232 degrees Fahrenheit.
That’s the temperature that makes GUINNESS taste like GUINNESS.” And then for another key ingredient: hops.

These combine with the roasted barley to give Guinness its perfectly balanced flavour. After the hops are added, the sweet wort is then boiled for 90 minutes before leaving it to cool and settle.

What is the oldest style of beer?

By far the oldest of the two types of beer, ale production can be traced back more than 5,000 years. The word ‘Ale’ comes from the German word ‘alt,’ meaning old or aged.

Who discovered hop?

History – The first documented hop cultivation was in 736, in the Hallertau region of present-day Germany, although the first mention of the use of hops in brewing in that country was 1079. However, in a will of Pepin the Short, the father of Charlemagne, hop gardens were left to the Cloister of Saint-Denis in 768.

Not until the 13th century did hops begin to start threatening the use of gruit for flavouring.
Gruit was used when the nobility levied taxes on hops.
Whichever was taxed made the brewer then quickly switch to the other.
In Britain, hopped beer was first imported from Holland around 1400, yet hops were condemned as late as 1519 as a “wicked and pernicious weed”.

In 1471, Norwich, England, banned use of the plant in the brewing of ale (“beer” was the name for fermented malt liquors bittered with hops; only in recent times are the words often used as synonyms). In Germany, using hops was also a religious and political choice in the early 16th century.

There was no tax on hops to be paid to the Catholic church, unlike on gruit.
For this reason the Protestants preferred hopped beer.
Hops used in England were imported from France, Holland and Germany and were subject to import duty ; it was not until 1524 that hops were first grown in the southeast of England ( Kent ), when they were introduced as an agricultural crop by Dutch farmers.

Consequently, many words used in the hop industry derive from the Dutch language, Hops were then grown as far north as Aberdeen, near breweries for convenience of infrastructure. According to Thomas Tusser ‘s 1557 Five Hundred Points of Good Husbandry : “The hop for his profit I thus do exalt, It strengtheneth drink and it flavored malt; And being well-brewed long kept it will last, And drawing abide, if ye draw not too fast.” In England there were many complaints over the quality of imported hops, the sacks of which were often contaminated by stalks, sand or straw to increase their weight.

As a result, in 1603, King James I approved an Act of Parliament banning the practice by which “the Subjects of this Realm have been of late years abused &c. to the Value of £20,000 yearly, besides the Danger of their Healths”. Hop cultivation was begun in the present-day United States in 1629 by English and Dutch farmers.

Before prohibition, cultivation was mainly centred around New York, California, Oregon, and Washington state, Problems with powdery mildew and downy mildew devastated New York’s production by the 1920s, and California only produces hops on a small scale.

Who started Hop Valley brewing?

Chuck Hare, one of the founders of Hop Valley, said the owners still have ‘substantial ownership’ with the new partnership. He declined to share specific financial aspects of the deal. Hop Valley operates brewpubs in the Gateway area of Springfield and Whiteaker neighborhood of Eugene.

Did Romans use hops?

Relax, hop-o-philes, these perennials probably won’t run out, but do keep in mind that Roman beer drinkers never had the pleasure of a hoppy ending in their pint.
The rise of the hop is a medieval development, though even at that time their use was controversial.
Hops grow at Crossroads Farm near to Coburg, Oregon.

Greeks viewed hops as a wild plant and Romans used them more as an herb or perhaps a vegetable, both for flavoring and for some medicinal purposes. In the same manner that white beers are associated with Bavaria and porters with Britain, different areas around the ancient Mediterranean had various types of brews.

A brewery at Hierakonpolis produced up to 1,200 liters per week.
The Midas Touch is a “sweet yet dry” barley beer from Delaware brewery Dogfish Head, which has a,
Series of ancient ales.
They worked with archaeologist Pat McGovern to reconstruct a 2,700 year old recipe from ancient Turkey (Image via Bernt Rostad, Flickr.

Roman writers largely convey the idea that civil Romans sipped fine wines and used olive oil, while the “barbarian” cultures to their north (e.g., Celts, Germans) drank beer called cervesia and milk.
Why, these barbarians even used butter.
Northern brews often had a hefty amount of herbs and spices in them rather than hops.

Image via the author). Wooden tablets from the fort of Vindolanda along Hadrian’s wall even give us the names of ancient brewers and malters working in Roman Britain. Military bases were a common place for brewers to set up shop and thrive; soldiers were thirsty customers. Numerous inscriptions indicate that brewers also lived alone the Rhine river in modern Germany and likely shipped beer in wooden barrels made by barrel-makers referred to as cuparii- where we get the modern “cooper.” This beer shipped along the Rhine or in Roman Britain would need to have been drank rather quickly due to far fewer preservatives to keep it fresh.

We must go to the Carolingians in order to find hops in beer. As historian Richard Unger points out, in 768, during the reign of Pepin the Short (Charlemagne’s father), the king gifted humlonariae (probably hop gardens) to the abbey of St. Denis. It is likely that monks in the early 9th century began to use hops cultivated in their hops gardens for the beer made at the monastery.

Hops continued to grow and to be used in beers, but also to cause controversy.
The abbess Saint Hildegard of Bingen mentions their use in beer and for medicinal purposes in the 12th century, indicating that their benefits were quite known by the High Middle Ages.
In 1380, the archbishop of Cologne outlawed hopped beers from Westphalia in an effort to promote the use of his own gruit in brews.

Why was hops added to beer?

It doesn’t seem to matter what your individual hertitage or ethnicity is; somewhere in your ancestory beer making is involved.
Check it out! Following is a very, very condensed version of the history of beer that only briefly covers a few aspects of how beer ever came to be in the first place.
Did you ever wonder how Hops ended up in beer? The answer may surprise you.

Drinking beer was high risk activity- you might get drunk; you might get dead! Men who could successfully brew batch after batch of brew that didn’t kill you were called “masters” and were very respected.
You can bet they carefully guarded their brewing recipes! (Believe it or not, religious monks had some of the best recipes!) Beer that tasted good didn’t come into the picture until later.

Each region developed beers with flavors that have become classics – German Pilsners, English Stouts, Scottish Ales,
All this history has led to today.
Cross-breeding and creating new Hop varieties is leading to a craft brewing explosion of new beers with totally new flavors and profiles.
New combinations of hops and malted grains used with new brewing techniques create new brews daily.

I hope this has piqued your interest and get you to investigate further. There is some really cool info out there that should not be forgotten!

Gaspar Aparicio