“I was kind of shocked when I first found out we lost our mother language a hundred years ago. He suggests ecclesiastical authorities were quite happy to see hops, with their sedating, anaphrodesiacal qualities replace “highly intoxicating narcotic, aphrodisiacal, and psychotropic” gruit mix.Ī student of linguistics and language history, Overberg is well-versed in the impact of German unification in the 1870s, but even he was taken by surprise upon discovering more about the subsequent and rapid industrialization of Westphalia’s folk traditions and culture.
There is another theory of gruit’s decline, put forward by Stephen Harrod Buhner in his book, Sacred and Healing Herbal Beers.
The power of the gruit monopoly dwindled. Hops eventually supplanted gruit as the dominant botanical addition to beer, preferred for their lower cost, their less astringent and more pleasing bitterness, and better preservative qualities that delayed the souring of beer. But by the 19th century, and in fact much earlier, northern Europe’s gruit tradition had long ceased to exist anywhere except within old Gruthaus records.īeer made with hops and beer made with gruit existed in parallel, and in some regions-including in Münster, as evidenced by archival material-hops were even used as part of the gruit herb mixture. All that’s left of it is an echo, its former location now named Gruetgasse. Münster’s master of gruit, the Grutherr, set up business in an annex to the city’s Gothic town hall as far back as the 12th century, and the Gruthaus stood there until it was demolished in the 1860s. In Münster the gruit monopoly was in the control of first the ruling prince-bishops and subsequently the civilian town council for whom it made up, at one point in the 14th century, two-thirds of the city’s revenue. The local gruit recipe, along with the right to mix and sell it, was held as a monopoly either by civilian or church authorities, acting as an indirect tax on brewers who were obligated to buy gruit if they wanted to make beer. Belgian and Dutch gruit makers added laurel berries, probably sourced from southern Europe, while the use of juniper in brewing in Scandinavia predates medieval herbal beers. Every gruit mix was determined by the plants that grew nearby where bog myrtle was more prevalent in the Low Countries and western Germany, marsh (or wild) rosemary was used more in northern Germany and in Scandinavia. What went into a particular gruit mixture was determined by geography and climate, but the basic components were largely the same: bog myrtle as a primary ingredient in addition to yarrow, wild rosemary, caraway, juniper, wormwood and whatever other herbs and spices were indigenous or available to a gruit maker. But once upon a time, Münster was home to a thriving brewing center, plugged into a pre-modern, northern European gruit-making culture where the people in control of the gruit demurred only to bishops and mayors. It has none of the historical brewing cachet of its neighbors Cologne and Düsseldorf to the west, nor the urban edge of Berlin’s new wave craft beer scene to the east, nevermind the internationally celebrated traditions of Bavaria to the south. Münster seems an unlikely home for a new generation of German brewing radicals. Their techniques could be described as an offshoot of Belgium’s spontaneous and mixed-fermentation brewing traditions, and of Nordic farmhouse brewing’s primordial practices. They’re seeking something more primitive and more authentically rooted in their surroundings. They might not put it this way, but the goal of these brewers is to go backwards-to a time before hops were king, and before Pasteur’s research led to modernized brewing, with its formulaic insistence on single yeast strains.
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