A Delicious Guide To the History and Science of Food

"Humans have been drinking beer for at least 8,000 years—and, for almost all that time, beer looked nothing like the industrial lager or hop-heavy craft brews popular now. Though today’s brewers consider hops a crucial ingredient in beer, it wasn’t until medieval Europe that the bitter plant became a popular addition. Gruit ales were flavored with a mix of herbs, the old-fashioned way to bitter a brew before hops surpassed it between the 11th and 16th centuries.  Until then, hops were just “one of the bazillion things you could put in a beer,” brewer Butch Heilshorn told Gastropod. Heilshorn is one of the few brewers in America experimenting with “gruits,” as hop-free beers are called.  For this episode, Gastropod visited Earth Eagle Brewings, the Portsmouth, New Hampshire-based brewery Heilshorn co-founded in 2012, to learn how the future of beer might lie in its long-forgotten past." - ATLAS_OBSCURA