Hops & Change
A hop crisis is looming. But is the modern palate ready for the old-school, hopless, botanical styles of gruit beer?
The Great Margarita Disaster of 2014 is upon us. People are panicking, dipping into their savings accounts, even, to shell out the 50 cents to a dollar it now costs to purchase a single lime. Some, in desperation, have even resorted to using lemons. But just as one devastating crop shortage is reaching its peak, an even more threatening shortage looms on the horizon. Thanks to the explosive growth of the American craft beer industry, it has been forewarned that a shortage of hops is imminent. Yes, that means your favorite pint of hop-heavy IPA could lighten your wallet even more in the near future.Mugwort lager? Guinness knockoffs flavored with bog myrtle?
The craft beer industry may only make up 7% of the total U.S. beer market, but it packs over half of the total U.S. hop harvest into its fan-favorite pale ales, IPAs, double IPAs, and countless other styles. The hop farmers of the Pacific Northwest can’t keep up. To make matters worse, the purchasing of hops is mostly done via futures-based contracts. Bigger companies are already staking their hop claims as far into the future as they can afford, leaving the up-and-comers with a questionably hoppy future. Most brewers seem to agree that if the time comes, they’ll adjust financially to compensate for the increased cost or rework recipes to get more out of less hops. But these aren’t the only options.
Before hops became a ubiquitous ingredient in beer, something often referred to as gruit took their place. While historically the word gruit referred to a number of different things, it can generally be defined in this context as a blend of herbs and other vegetation used in brewing beer. The composition of gruit varied widely from recipe to recipe, containing all sorts of things you’d find in jars in a New-Age homeopathic medicine shop. Yarrow, wild rosemary, laurel, gentian, mugwort, and woodruff pop up here and there, but the most consistent ingredient is Myrica gale, known commonly as sweet gale or bog myrtle. Other, more common household herbs and spices like juniper berry, ginger, caraway, anise, nutmeg, and cinnamon also found their way into these ancient blends.
From the medieval period onward, gruit was popularly used to flavor, bitter, and, in some cases, preserve beer, much like hops do in modern beers. The natural bitterness of the herbs and spices would have been used to effectively balance the sweetness of the sugary mash while adding distinctive and pungent flavors and aromas to the brew. Many of the herbs used, bog myrtle in particular, are also naturally antimicrobial, giving gruit a preservative property against bacterial spoilage. Gruit remained the foremost flavoring component in beer for centuries across Europe, particularly in Germany, Scandinavia, Belgium, and the Netherlands. It even hung around as a minority ingredient after hops took over as the major flavoring, bittering, and preserving agent in beer in the 1700s or so, only falling completely out of popularity later in the 19th century....MORE
Yikes.
In 2008 it was:
Hops shortage shakes up brewers
Higher Hops Costs Raise Price Of Beer
Beer may become the new gas, in price
"Shut up. You've got your beer, haven't you?"In 2010:
-Fat Hermann, during the Beer Hall Putsch
European Malting Barley: Damit ist eine Katastrophe vorprogrammiert.
(It's a recipe for disaster)
Commodities: Contaminated Malting Barley Causes Super-effervescent Beer, Barley Prices Explode
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