Beermaker Craig Neuzil called Decorah Nordic Gruit "the anti-IPA." "Everybody was making these big, juicy, India pale ales and seeing how much hop bitterness they could get into it," said Neuzil, the ...

Gruit is an ancient form of beer brewed with an ever-­changing array of exotic herbs and spices in place of hops. It disappeared centuries ago but now sits at the cutting-edge of the American craft ...

It's all about the hops in America's beer world right now. However, a thousand years ago in continental Europe, the benefit of hops in beer was barely known, due to their geography and availability.

In today’s IPA-crazed climate, it’s hard to imagine a time when beer was brewed without hops. But hopless, herbed and spiced ales – called gruits (rhymes with “fruits”) – were common throughout most ...

Like you, I'm old enough to remember when the prerequisite for beer appreciation was a simple piece of photo ID, not a PhD. But you cite two styles with long-established roots, and they're worth ...

We live under the tyranny of hopped beers. Briefly, "gruit" is a combination of different botanicals that do the same work as hops in modern beer recipes, providing flavor but also ensuring that ...

CROWDED INTO A refrigerated shed in rural Sonoma County on a recent afternoon were dozens of beer kegs, a few cases of bottles, boxes of hops just delivered from Washington state and two brewers, one ...

Here is Owl Meat with a Midnight Sun report on hops, gruit and the history of beer ingredients: Some like it hot. I like it hotter. I am a flavor ninja. I like my Thai food spicy enough to make muscle ...

It's hard to say exactly what beers brewed hundreds of years ago would have tasted like to our discerning, modern palates, but we do know with certainty that most of these old-timey ales were missing ...