Today it is hard to imagine beer without hops. For most of brewing history, though, they were optional or absent altogether. The slow rise of the hop from a wild vine to beer’s defining ingredient took many centuries, and one of the most quoted early witnesses is Hildegard of Bingen, a twelfth-century abbess, composer, mystic and writer on nature and medicine.
Before hops: gruit and early hop gardens
Medieval brewers in much of northwestern Europe flavoured their ale with gruit, a blend of herbs that might include bog myrtle (sweet gale), yarrow, wild rosemary and other plants. Recipes varied and were sometimes closely guarded. In many territories the right to sell gruit, the gruitrecht, belonged to a local lord or bishop, which made it a source of tax income. Changing the flavouring of beer was therefore a political and financial matter as well as a question of taste.
Hops appear in documents well before Hildegard. A Frankish record of 768 CE mentions King Pepin the Short granting hop gardens to the Abbey of Saint-Denis near Paris. In 822, statutes drawn up by Abbot Adalhard of Corbie refer to gathering hops, apparently for making beer. Some popular histories cite an even earlier date for hop growing in Bavaria’s Hallertau region, but that claim is shaky. It is also not always clear whether early hop gardens supplied brewers or had other uses, such as medicine or fibre.
What Hildegard wrote
Around the 1150s Hildegard compiled Physica, a treatise on the properties of plants, animals and stones. In her entry on the hop she was not an enthusiast. She considered it a plant that could bring on melancholy. But she also noted that its bitterness kept drinks from spoiling and helped them last longer. That observation, about hops as a preservative, is exactly why brewers eventually adopted them.
Hildegard was not a brewing pioneer in the sense of inventing hopped beer. She was recording knowledge that was already in circulation. Her fame has made her the name most often attached to this turning point.
The hop conquers Europe
From the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, hopped beer became a major export from northern German trading cities such as Bremen and Hamburg. It kept better than gruit ale and could travel farther. The style spread into the Low Countries and then to England in the fifteenth century, where hopped “beer” was at first seen as a foreign drink distinct from traditional unhopped “ale.” There was resistance. Some towns restricted hops, and a household ordinance of Henry VIII is often misremembered as a national ban. Over time the economics of longer shelf life won out.
Why it matters
Hops changed what beer could be. A preserved, stable drink could be brewed in larger batches, stored for longer and shipped along trade routes, which helped turn brewing into a commercial industry. Hops also defined beer’s flavour, the bitterness and aroma that later lead straight to pilsners and IPAs. Hildegard’s cautious remark about a bitter vine sits near the start of that long story.