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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Kuit, princesse, Loender, more kuit… lately slowly but surely Dutch beers surface that are based on a rediscovered beer type from the past. It’s not yet a complete renaissance, but all in all there’s more and more Dutch beer history on the market, and then I’m not even mentioning the home brews. Time for a recap. (more…)

There it is right in front of me, and how great it looks: the book. Verloren Bieren van Nederland, which is Dutch for ‘Lost Beers of the Netherlands’, released by Dutch publisher Unieboek/Spectrum. A blue hard cover, smooth paper inside, with full-colour illustrations. The story of Dutch beer from beginning to end, interwoven with recipes. I think it’s the most beautiful beer book to be published this year, but of course I’d find that. (more…)

On this blog I do not often write about me visiting breweries. Hardly ever, actually. Not that I hadn’t wished to take a look around in a Medieval gruit house, in an eighteenth-century mol brewery or at De Kraan en de Drie Snoeken in my home town, but that time machine still has to be invented. Luckily, the next best thing has just opened in Amsterdam. Not just another hip brewery just outside the city centre, it’s more than that, or at least if you are slightly nuts about historic beer. (more…)

The search for lost beers continues, while debunking the odd beer myth along the way. And sometimes brewers used quite remarkable ingredients. In Breda, they used skimmed milk.

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Sometimes a question pops up in your head which makes you think: why has no-one asked it before? Like: what is the oldest beer in The Netherlands still in existence? All this time I have been talking about ‘lost beers’, but what beers actually didn’t go lost? Beers where you can draw a straight line between their origin and today? The answer comes from 1872, and it is surprising, but also nicely appropriate for this time of the year…

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Yesterday I met Belgian beer writer Luc de Raedemaeker, who proudly showed me his new ‘Belgian Beer book’, an enormous book with lots of nice photographs. I congratulated him on this remarkable effort, then I opened it and the first thing I read was: ‘Duke John of Brabant, also called Jan Primus…’ Noooo! Are people still repeating this nonsense? So for the last time, after I already told my Dutch-speaking readers: why John of Brabant wasn’t a beer god.

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You may have noticed him on the European mainland: the legendary beer king Gambrinus. Omnipresent in German pubs, Dutch beer labels, Czech advertising posters, and so on. A jolly bearded guy, crown on his head, beer in his hand. A ‘Santa Claus of beer’ if you like. But where does he come from? Was he once a real person, like duke John I of Brabant, as is often claimed?

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As told in the previous article, historical princesse beer by d’Oranjeboom is now available. In two flavours: the ‘normal’ brown-amber princesse beer after my adaptation of the recipe in the 1866 book De praktische bierbrouwer, and a ‘White princesse’ with wheat. The label says it is ‘is inspired by a 1788 Flemish white beer tribute to the Dutch Princesse beer’. And indeed that year Antonius Parmentier from Bruges advertised his ‘white Dutch Princesse beers similar to those sold in Amsterdam, Rotterdam and Alkmaar’. But a recipe by Parmentier has not been preserved, so the people at d’Oranjeboom have devised one of their own. But is there an element of historical truth in it? Has such a princesse wheat beer ever existed?

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