Last time, I wrote about my first impressions of Belgian Beer World. This costly tourist attraction opened in 2023 right in the heart of Brussels, capital of beer country Belgium. It cost 90 million euros to renovate the old stock exchange building and set up the exhibit on the nation’s most popular drink. Most of this money was coughed up by the government, as the Belgian brewers themselves only contributed less than 6 million.[1]

Let’s just see how well this money was spent. After all, Belgian beer culture is on Unesco’s protected Cultural Heritage list, Belgium is home to the world’s biggest brewery, AB InBev. Belgium is rightly known for the great variety and quality of its beers, including a few respectable types that have been around for centuries, such as white beer, gueuze-lambic and Flemish old brown, and newer beers that found their way into drinkers’ hearts such as abbey beer, saison, Belgian strong pale ale, fruit beer and spéciale belge.

This should be a no-brainer, right? All this should logically result in a high-end top-quality visitor ‘experience’, not in the least because so much old and new material is available, and because so much wonderful history has been recorded, so many fantastic stories to tell? As might be expect from the united Belgian Brewers, who have a reputation to uphold? How difficult can it be to brew something worthwile out of that?

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Gruit was a Medieval beer ingredient in the Low Countries and westernmost Germany, as we saw in the previous article. Local governments had a monopoly on it and made good money selling it. But too often, people like to pretend there is something mysterious about what exactly gruit was composed of, and what purpose it served. However, gruit isn’t such a big mystery: more information has been preserved than you may have thought. So here’s a quick survey of gruit, and now you never need to say anymore that we don’t know anything about it.

Aloys Schulte. Source: Wikipedia

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Recently someone added me to a gruit chat group on Facebook, called ‘The Gruit Guild’. That meant many pictures of brews and of people picking herbs out on the heath. After all, gruit was a herb mix added to beer in the Middle Ages, before people started using hops. But recently, someone asked a historical question, so I was happy to interfere. The question was: where did gruit actually occur? A fact check!

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The Belgian Beer Book is an impressive edition. With 704 full-colour pages, it weighs 2 kilos. The book that Belgian beer culture and tradition deserves, you’d say. Last September, when it came out, I happened to meet one of the authors, Luc de Raedemaeker. He had the book with him, he was barely able to carry it. I opened the book and immediately I broke out in a cold sweat. It contains the worst collection of glaring bollocks on beer history I’ve ever seen put together.

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To be perfectly honest, I started this quest for the lost beers of Holland mainly looking for recipes of the 18th and 19th century. Why? Two reasons: they are easier to find and to interpret, and nobody had really written about them before. So far, every new beer recipe feels like a lost treasure found after deep digging. Still, the 19th century is not exactly the heyday of Dutch beer. The Middle Ages were. For a few centuries Holland was the leading beer exporting country that taught even the British and Belgians how to brew beer with hops. But we’ll get to that.

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