Hops won the beer wars partly because the Church taxed the alternative
For centuries European brewers flavoured beer with gruit, a mix of bitter herbs such as heather and ground ivy. Hops, the flowers of a climbing vine related to cannabis, slowly pushed it aside. They kept beer from spoiling, but in 16th-century Germany they had another appeal: unlike gruit, they carried no tax owed to the Catholic Church.
Hops are the green cone-shaped flowers of Humulus lupulus, and only female plants are grown commercially. They make beer bitter, balance the sweetness of malt, add floral, fruity or citrus aromas and suppress unwanted microbes. Brewers likely dropped their old herb mixtures once they noticed that hopped beer lasted longer. On farms the vigorous vines are trained up strings or wires, which lets them grow far larger on the same sunlight without spending energy on sturdy stems.
Cultivation is recorded in the Hallertau region of Germany in 736, and in 768 Pepin the Short, father of Charlemagne, left hop gardens to the abbey of Saint-Denis. Hops entered German brewing records in 1079, though gruit held on until the 13th century, and taxes kept tipping brewers back and forth: whichever ingredient the nobility taxed, brewers switched to the other. Protestants later favoured hopped beer because it escaped church levies.
Britain resisted. Hopped beer arrived from Holland around 1400, yet in 1519 hops were still being denounced as a wicked and pernicious weed. Dutch farmers began growing them in Kent in 1524, which is why much of the trade's vocabulary is Dutch. Imported sacks were so often padded with sand, stalks or straw that in 1603 James I approved an act banning the fraud. English and Dutch farmers started growing hops in North America in 1629, though mildew wrecked New York's crop by the 1920s.
Today the plant thrives in moist temperate zones, much of it near the 48th parallel north, and Germany and the United States grow about three quarters of the world's crop. Hops like the same soil as potatoes, so leading American potato states also grow hops. Famous regions include the Hallertau, Žatec in the Czech Republic and Washington's Yakima valley.
Source: Hops
