Domestic Thursday: Gruit Exploration

If you know someone who pickles their own trotters, and makes oddly herbal bitters, serve them a gruit if they ask for a beer. But, you may ask, what is a gruit? And how is it pronounced? Er, well, I'm not 100% sure on the latter. Seems like you make it into a long "ooo" sound. As for the former, gruit is just math: beer, minus the hops, plus a bunch of herbs. Hops didn't always enjoy their current monopoly on beer flavouring. Before the hoppy takeover, brewers could, and often did, throw in a potion's worth of herbs and spices to flavour and preserve their beer. 

 

And, now that we can drink like King Midas thanks to spectrometry, it's not surprising gruits are back as well. I tried my first, a special from Beau's called St. Luke's Verse, at the beginning of the month. It contains lavender, thyme and rosemary, and I liked mostly for its striking resemblance to Brio. Maybe it could have used a heavier, malty base. That's what the bartender thought, but I also think it would have been perfect as is, if only in the summer. 

My second is also from Beau's, but the Bog Water is easier to come by. You might still be able to find it on the shelf at the LCBO, and it features bog myrtle from a real Ontario bog. This beer is an odd one. The taste made me think of spicy floral, and I could feel (instead of really taste, somehow) a bitterness at the back of my throat. And yes, I drank it out of a mug because why be fussy about the glassware of a gruit? It comes from a freaking bog!

Interestingly, both of these beers contain something you would expect in a regular beer, but maybe not a gruit: hops. Turns out that hops are just better at preserving things, including the tradition of the gruit.