I trust that few of us have enjoyed an ale flavoured with gruit. There are some ales in production which still use it, but it is a rare drink made for connoisseurs, but had you lived in Saxon England, gruit is what you would have got. So what is it?
Gruit [grut, gruyt] is a herbal mixture. There is no set recipe, and it is likely that the brewers used whatever was available to them at different times of year and in a variety of places. We need to be clear, ale was made in private homes, often by the wife of the household, and much depended upon what herbs were available to her. It was also brewed in institutions,such as monasteries, and in the large monasteries there were always herb gardens, so the task of the monastic herbalist was not always to make medicines, but to grow the herbs to flavour the monks' beer. If you look at Strabo's garden, the plot tended by Walafrid Strabo, a mediaeval abbot, there is artemisia, which is a herb widely used for flavouring ale, and Strabo was not growing that for nothing. In some large monasteries there would have been a special garden tended for the purpose of providing flavourants for the ale.
So what was in gruit? It was water flavoured with several or all of the following herbs:sweet gale [myrica or bog myrtle] , artemisia, yarrow [Achillea millefolium] ground ivy [hedera] , horehound [marrubium] and/or heather. The recipe involved soaking the herbs in warm water for several hours, depending upon the herb, until the water was flavoured to the brewer's satisfaction. It was then added to the must, the beer/ale mixture and drunk. Certain herbs have advantages as ale flavourants. Artemisia, the genus that includes wormwood, is the bitterest herb known to humans, and other members of this genus are bitter as well. The Saxons knew artemisia as mugwort. wort being a Saxon term for plant, the wort which goes in your mugs!
Heather is special. Its flowers make a delicate flavouring, but you need a pint of them and they have to be soaked overnight for twenty four hours, so I believe. I can imagine a misbehaving monk being given a penance of collecting a few pints of heather flowers. They make a lovely drink, but picking them is a long and arduous task. Of course the penance might involve going to pick bog myrtle, a muddy and chilly task at times.
Comments
Without the widget the Guinness would be less fizzy. I don't think that you should let your sentients play with the widget, as it might be small enough to choke them if they play with it.
Recently, the grocery store where I shop had quite a markdown on Guinness, which I don't know and which I opted to try for the first time just before Lent. So I let myself be swayed by the very attractive prices and purchased an eight-pack of canned Guinness.
I sampled a can and kept hearing something moving on the bottom. Finally, I saw a little white ball after I managed to hack an opening into the top of the can, which, despite its mangling, still will be able to go into recycling.
Internet sources say that the little ball is a widget that keeps nitrifying the canned Guinness.
What would the flavoring in Guinness taste like if it didn't have that ball, which is absent from the bottled four-packs that I see on the shelves?
Would this ball not be something that I can let my sentient kittens and cats play with?
I must confess that I hardly ever drink gin, so it is hard for me to express a preference. The link to Portugal is interesting, as Portugal is England' oldest ally and there have been longstanding cultural and trading relationships between the two countries.
If anyone knows the answer, it's Frank! Thank you!
Internet sources include an article, This Unique Gin Liquor is Flavored with Turnips, Berries and Herbs, by Laura McQuarrie July 15, 2016, on the Trendhunter site. McQuarrie indicates that Ginabo is now the world's only gin flavored with turnips. But she links turnip-flavored gin to Portugal!
This makes me try to imagine how gin and tonic would taste if the former were turnip-flavored, not juniper berry-flavored.
Which would you prefer, gin with juniper, surplus grain (what kind?) or turnips?
I should have said that cheaper gin came from turnips, but other gin came from surplus grain. Farmers started growing for the gin industry, so it became plentiful.
Eating steamed turnip greens yesterday caused me to consider this afternoon again a sentence that I noticed the first time around and then the second and third times, with my current re-readings of your wizzleys.
You indicate in the next-to-the-last paragraph of your last heading, Other Flavours, that "For some reason as hops were taking over the flavouring of beer they never took over in spirit production, so during the gin craze in the eighteenth century, when politically influential farmers coaxed the government to take duty off gin to enable them to sell their surplus turnips, the juniper berry became the flavouring of choice."
Is it known why there was a problem with too many unsold turnips? (Mine last night were delicious ;-D)
This is good information.Thanks. England is a tradion loving place, so its people were probably content with traditionally flavoured ale, which used other flavourings. Moreover,much ale was brewed domestically by women, so if women did not grow hops in their herb gardens hops would not be used.
Online sources describe hop-brewing in Germany and in France by 736 and 768 respectively.
Considering William the Conqueror's and the Plantagenet line's origins south of the Channel, is it somewhat surprising that it took so long, seven centuries, for hops to establish north of the Channel?
On a recent television programme, Countryfile [2cnd August 2021] we saw a Scottish brewer from Fife making gruit out of Yarrow.
There is no record of temperatures, but I think that the water would have been warmed first, but allowed to cool with the herbs in it.