Gruits?

This post warms my Medievalist heart. While I havent found an ancient Ale in the abv range i like. I I drink traditonal Ales daily which dont have much hops in them.

 

In 2018 I was working towards my all-style goal, and had just a few styles left. I had been looking for a Gruit/Ancient Herbed Ale style beer for a while and the only one I could find "locally" was Groot, a Gruit brewed a 6-hour drive away from me at Oliphant in Somerset, WI. I watched their tap list and after a few weeks I saw that it was on tap. I quickly organized a family shopping trip, where my son and I dropped the womenfolk at an outlet mall, while we went to Oliphant where I had it on tap and got a crowler. It was pretty decent, though not a new favorite beer or style. Clever name though. Of course we made the most of the trip by stopping at the historic Casanova Liquor and the adjacent The Nova restaurant, plus a Total Whine.

Oliphant Groot

Casanova Liquor

 

Agreed regarding Dogfish Head. Their Midas Touch has been my favorite of the style, but I've sadly only found a handful of Gruits or similar herbed brews to try. Some of those were pretty bad but it was still refreshing that they varied widely. I wish there were more around to try.

 

I pretty much agree with most of that. I don't think a gruit beer needs to be made with a specific mix of herbs... but I also don't think it makes sense to use that label for anything in the brewer's imagination. My argument is that sake is sake, heather ale is heather ale, sahti is sahti, gotlandsdricka is gotlandsdricka, gruit beer is gruit beer, and so on. In my opinion, to take one of those names and apply it broadly to those other beverages is a very poor choice. Similarly, I wouldn't decide that udon noodles should be called tagliatelle pasta. There's no reason to use an exotic word incorrectly.

I don't even know what precedent is being used to justify it other than a very poorly worded BeerAdvocate category and things that followed in BeerAdvocate's footsteps like Untappd (and brewers who look to BeerAdvocate to decide what their beer is). I hate the idea of going to competition guidelines, but it's worth noting that GABF, BJCP, and WBC do not even mention the word gruit (as far as I know) in the descriptions of their 100+ style lists that include such categories and "herb and spice beer" and "historical beer."

Gruit wasn't any hopless beer, it wasn't even beer, it was a herb mixture from a time and place. It also has absolutely no direct relation to Sam Calagione's team concocting a beer with safron inspired by something from the Iron Age. I'm obviously not going to convince anyone here of that but I wonder if anyone can actually present a decent argument why it's in good form to appropriate the term and strip it of it's meaning and context. I'm not saying that you are making that argument, but at this point, if someone wants to continue to call Midas Touch a gruit, I believe they are making that argument.

I genuinely appreciate all the pushback to my posts. That's what makes the conversation awesome... but I should just quit repeating myself. I could also be wrong about a lot of things, but I'm just presenting things as I see them. Cheers.

 

@zid, I certainly agree when it comes to things like Midas Touch. I read your initial post as saying that for a beer to realistically be called a 'gruit' it needs to adhere to some precise spice/herb blend and not just be any beer that doesn't have hops.
For me, it makes sense to call a hopless beer that is flavored with other herbs a gruit unless it is a recreation of another distinct style, like sahti or heather ale. Gruit is a word that has caught on in the modern zeitgeist (I think I first saw it in the book Sacred and Herbal Healing Beers) and as such has a new ability to convey information more efficiently than 'ale brewed with x,y,z herbs'.
But yes, calling a beer wine hybrid pulled from a sumerian tomb a gruit is certainly stretching the definition. I like the term 'ancient ale' as a better catch all (of course then we're going to have to hear all about what makes an ale an ale) and you've convinced me to start using that more broadly

 

Well, I thought that I had tried Gruit Beer and liked it, but after reading this thread, I'm not sure it was Gruit Beer until it was, but may be not. In either case, I enjoyed the beverage from Mad Fritz which didn't use hops.

I think that I need a beer...

 

Well, it's not about "victory" but the dialogue (and it's also apparently about over-carbonated beer in a fridge, but that was for a different thread )... which is the best thing for this topic. What I'm saying is that the intent of my posts were the same as that of the thread - to get people to talk about the subject. If it's a victory it is certainly a hollow one, cause let's face it, people basically don't really care about the subject except for the tiniest percentage.

@unlikelyspiderperson - As mentioned, the brewer calls the style of Midas Touch an "Ancient ale." A long time ago I realized the pitfalls of referring to a beer as a certain style because of BeerAdvocate classifications vs brewer intention. Perhaps you know me too well because the "ale" aspect of that term is something that I grapple with too (even though you're kidding). I even deliberately avoided saying ale in this thread unless I felt like I was quoting something else. BUT, to go a step further and look at the first word - claims of "ancient" or "historic" shouldn't be unexamined either. If someone actually feels like Midas Touch (for example) is a genuinely honest-to-goodness resurrected beverage drank in ancient times rather than a modern "inspired by" beer, I think they're partially kidding themselves. For everyone's sake though, there's no need to open up those debates here, so I'm leaving it at that. (and yeah, I realize I'm practically a parody of myself) @ForagedBudLite - when you say "no one can object to that," it shows you haven't been around here long enough. (Glad to have you here though. Please stick around.)

 

I get your general point, but from some quick searching, what are the defining characteristics of a heather ale vs. a gruit? From what I can see, they both can contain heather tips, mugwort, etc. Yes, they may have come from different regions, but they seem pretty similar in concept and I dont see any bright dividing line.

Cambridge Brewing Company makes a heather ale that includes yarrow and sweet gale, which I believe they have referred to as a gruit at times. How would one know if it is properly a heather ale or gruit?

I would think a lot of the specifics have been lost to history and there may have been overlap or evolution of ingredients and techniques.

 

@zid I appreciate the conversation too, I'm a big fan of language and definitely thinks it works best when it's evolution (which almost always happens through misuse, intentional, creative, and otherwise) is regularly checked by discussion like this to try to get most people on the same page.
Personally, I'm fine with "ale" being an almost synonym with "beer" and thus think "ancient ale" is great term for all the weird old beer styles from santi to gruit to whatever midas touch is. To me, an honest attempt to recreate a historically accurate recipe would be a "historic brew" or some such, "ancient ale" captures the spirit of brewers today inspired by odd tidbits if recipe and techniques from the mists of time.
"gruit" seems like a good term generally for un hopped, herb/spice beers inspired by the brewing tradition of north/central Europe, so you could call a Heather ale a subset of gruit. This may end up just being my convention but that's where I'm at.
Thanks all for these weird overly complex discussions of beer style naming convention minutia, it's one of my favorite things about this place

 

@Glider - Some people will only focus on ingredients when it comes to beer classification but I put culture into the equation too. The use of various plants as bittering agents (including hops) will be found throughout all of Europe. When I said heather ale (a beverage made with heather rather than gruit, despite the possibility of some overlap of ingredients), I was specifically thinking of beverages related to the cultures of Scotland, Ireland, England (rather than a specific recipe) - where "gruit" has no history. Call 'em all herbed ales or herb beers if you want, but ales from that region were never called gruit ales and there is no reason for anyone today to do that. For me, "gruit" should be reserved as a reference to the gruit mixtures of the time and place from where/when they existed... or for herb mixtures today that are attempting to replicate them. For me - To do otherwise would be careless and not respectful to history and culture. You can think I'm just being picky about language but this topic is a matter of language. I'm sorry for being so repetitive in this thread, but I thought your post deserved a response.

I feel like a pariah around here when I bring stuff like this up. If the above doesn't seem to make logical sense, then I'm sure there's nothing that can make someone see it otherwise. In some ways craft culture is designed to look at things the other way... where a US brewer is penalized in the eyes of beer geeks if they don't make everything from saison to Kölsch. Before I wrote this post, I did some digging to see if I could find any interesting information to make me soften my position, but I was genuinely surprised to actually find a blog post with a similar attitude:
http://zythophile.co.uk/2014/02/28/was-it-ever-gruit-britain-the-herb-ale-tradition/

 

@zid, that's a really good point about the cultural integrity of terminology. It's a tricky line to ride between maintaining the integrity of a beer culture that is originally very granular by virtue of originating in a time when geographical distances were much "further" and keeping the lexicon needed to understand/interact with the modern hobby concise enough to be useful and not too intimidating.
Granted, most people who are exploring gruits/herbal beers/ancient ales are probably enough into the hobby to enjoy the experience of learning the terminology/history. There also seems to be reason to suspect that this currently obscure category could serve as an inroad to potential new customers that might appreciated appreciate a simpler nomenclature.
Ultimately this broad group of styles will need to command a lot more market share before anyone but the odd cadre we've assembled in this thread will care about we call the beers almost no one drinks

 

Ron Pattinson wrote: "Forget everything you've ever heard or read about Scottish beer. [...] The real history of Scottish beer is very different - and I think far more fascinating." While that idea isn't really analogous to this conversation (he's dealing with what he'd consider historic fiction vs historic fact), I think the last bit still rings true here. The story of actual gruit is way more interesting and rich than the results of thinking that gruit is any historical beer before the introduction of hops or any craft beer made with herbs or without hops. I find it odd that people on a website who argue about whether a beer is a pale ale, an IPA, or a DIPA might prefer the latter, but that's just me. The obvious difference is one of familiarity, which brings me to:

Yeah, but by then it's likely too late for any discussion to make the slightest impact. So it goes.

I need to add: My tone could be misinterpreted in my posts. If my posts are reading as if I'm some sort of inconsiderate keyboard warrior with steam coming out of my ears, that's not at all how I'm intending them to come across. Cheers.