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Gruit (or sometimes grut) is an old fashioned herb mixture used for bittering and flavoring beer, popular before the extensive use of hops. Gruit or grut ale may also refer to the beverage produced using gruit.
Gruit was a combination of herbs, some of the most common being mildly to moderately narcotic: sweet gale (Myrica gale), mugwort (Artemisia vulgaris), yarrow (Achillea millefolium), heather (Calluna vulgaris) and Marsh Labrador Tea (Rhododendron tomentosum, formerly known as Ledum palustre). Gruit varied somewhat, each gruit producer adding additional herbs to produce unique tastes, flavors, and effects. Other adjunct herbs were juniper berries, ginger, caraway seed, aniseed, nutmeg, and cinnamon or even hops in variable proportions; many of these ingredients may have psychotropic properties too. Some gruit ingredients are now known to have preservative qualities.
The exclusive use of gruit was gradually phased out in favour of the use of hops alone in a slow sweep across Europe occurring between the 11th century (in the south and east of the Holy Roman Empire) and the late 16th century (Great Britain).
In 16th century Britain, a distinction was made between ale, which was unhopped, and beer, brought by Dutch merchants, which was hopped. (Note : Nowadays, ale refers to beers produced through a top-fermentation process, not unhopped beer.)
The phasing out of gruit from brewing is linked to various factors. A possible political factor would be the general emancipation of princes (mainly German) from the political influence of the Roman Catholic Church in a movement that eventually was to lead to Martin Luther's protestations turning into a fully-fledged uprise of those princes against the authority of Rome, in what is known as the Reformation. Princes wanting to undermine the power of the Church therefore tended to promote brewing with hops rather than gruit, to try and cut off this revenue for the monastic orders who had a monopoly on it.
The fact is that the switch to hops started in Germany a good four or five centuries before the Reformation. Its later gradual enforcement in the 15th and early 16th centuries can in part be traced through some pieces of legislation drafted by political rulers before the Protestant Reformation even started. For example, the most notorious edict restricting spicing of beer to hops only (though, nowadays, most beer enthusiasts superficially reduce it to its "barley-only" clause), Bavaria's Reinheitsgebot dates from 1516, the year before Martin Luther kickstarted the Reformation by posting his 95 Theses on the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg.
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