In the early Middle Ages, ale and beer didn’t refer to separate drinks; they were more or less interchangeable. The brew indicated was made from sprouted wheat (dried and ground) brewed in water and then left to ferment. They added herbs according to taste and availability: pine needles, ivy, mint, caraway, acorns, bog myrtle, sage, sycamore sap, and others. Ale/beer in Sweden, Germany, the Netherlands and England tasted very different, but each batch differed by town, village and brewer as well. Herb blends were called “gruit,” and eventually a trade in gruit itself developed. Buying foreign gruit was the closest to buying foreign beer, since the drink itself was not traded internationally.
Ale kept for about five days before souring. It couldn’t be stockpiled against sudden future demand, nor could it be shipped beyond the next town. Most of it was brewed and drunk on the same street. Local ale brewers kept taverns supplied as well as selling to their neighbors; it was a home craft for the most part.
All this changed when German brewers discovered that a local gruit component, hops, changed the drink so that it didn’t spoil for up to six months. Beer that kept so long could be shipped and stockpiled. Taverns could keep a few barrels of hopped beer while meeting daily demand with local brews. Hopped beers could go on sea voyages, as water supply.
The Hanseatic League, a shipping monopoly in the Baltic sea, began to ship beer from Bremen, Hamburg and Wismar to the ports of the Netherlands. There, customers soon adjusted to the bitter tang of hopped beer and began to enjoy it. Hops flowers were exported, then hops growing expanded, and by the Renaissance, most beer was hopped. England was the lone conservative, as most drinkers there still preferred their traditional cider and ale. From this time, “beer” meant “with hops.”
Beer was always considered an inferior drink to wine, but it was much cheaper. Real wine-growing regions never fully switched to beer as daily drink. And by the close of the medieval period, home brewing persisted only in rural places. Regulation and taxes in town had driven small brewers out of business. The towns’ chief concern was that brewing needed large fires that might get out of control. Large breweries needed full-scale buildings that could have better fire safety than small, crowded town kitchens. Eventually, brewing was a guild craft.
Beer drinking had another huge boost after 1400, as the diet of Europe changed. Grain was suddenly plentiful in a new way; they could afford to make much of it into ale and beer. That’s what we’ll talk about next.