Skip to main content

The Manual may earn a commission when you buy through links on our site.

What Is a Gruit and Where Can You Find One?

beer snifter chalice glass
Image used with permission by copyright holder

Most beers you know and love today have four primary ingredients: water, barley, hops, and yeast. That’s due in large part to the centuries-old German beer purity law, or reinheitsgebot, which demanded beer be made using exclusively these ingredients and set the standard for today’s brews. 

But beer is an ancient beverage — historians believe its story stretches back to 5th millennium BC in Iran and went on to be enjoyed by the likes of Egyptian pharaohs and the Greek philosophers. However, if Socrates or Tutankhamun ever enjoyed a pint in their days, the beer was likely missing one of those four critical ingredients: the hop.

In today’s hop-hungry climate of India pale ales (and hazy IPAs, New England IPAs, milkshake IPAs, et cetera), it seems impossible that beer could exist without hops. The fact is that many other natural ingredients can serve as substitutes for the bittering, aromatic, and flavoring characteristics of hops. Today, if a beer relies on other herbs to fill the “hops” role, the beverage is classified as a gruit.

elderflower flower plant
Gruits use exotic additives like bog myrtle, horehound, elderflowers (pictured), and yarrow. Philip Halling/Wikimedia Commons

Gruit is the German word for herb. Instead of depending on hops, these brews use exotic additives like bog myrtle, horehound, elderflowers, and yarrow to offset the sweetness of the malts and create a more complex beverage.

Thanks to the creativity of modern breweries, you don’t have to travel back to the Middle Ages to find a gruit (though if you can, please let us in on your time travel technology). You can try them right now, but you will have to do some detective work.

“Authentic” gruits can be tough to find in the mainstream marketplace. That’s because some laws require hops be present for a product to be sold as beer. Not having the “beer” title would limit distribution and sales channels for some breweries.  To illustrate how rare gruits are in the current marketplace, there are currently 32,576 American IPAs listed on the Beer Advocate database and only 273 gruits.

But don’t despair — this list will help you get started on the path toward discovering modern versions of the ancient ale. Start your gruit journey here:

Best Gruit Beer

top of beer head foam
Image used with permission by copyright holder

Historic Ale Series by Williams Brothers Brewing Co.

Scotland’s Williams Brothers Brewing Co. has a Historic Ale Series in which brewers attempt to recreate traditional Scottish beers using what’s described as a “token” amount of hops. These beers include Alba, a Scots Pine Ale with sprigs of sprite and pine, meant to be consumed at room temperature. Williams Brothers also brews Fraoch, a heather ale that can be traced back to 2000 BC.

Kvasir by Dogfish Head

Dogfish Head may be famous for its 60 Minute IPA, but it is also home to the Ancient Ale series. For these brews, a bio-molecular archaeologist is enlisted to help recreate beers from remnants found in antique vessels. Kvasir’s recipe hails from Denmark and includes lingonberries, cranberries, myrica gale, yarrow, honey, and birch syrup. Kvasir hasn’t been on the release schedule for the last few years, but Dogfish Head is known to regularly resurrect (excavate?) its beers, so keep an eye out.

Lips of Faith Series Gruit by New Belgium Brewing Company

Like Kvasir, New Belgium’s Gruit hasn’t been released for a few years, but if you have one stuck back, recent reports on Untappd show that this beer is still drinking well despite “best buy” dates going back to 2015. Gruit features horehound, wormwood, and elderflowers.

How to Make Gruit

If you’re a homebrewer, you can make your own gruit. For inspiration, pick up the book Gardening for the Homebrewer: Grow and Process Plants for Making Beer, Wine, Gruit, Cider, Perry, and More by Wendy Tweten and Debbie Teashon. It’s an excellent primer to using traditional ingredients in your beers, and incorporating herbs you can tend yourself.

Regardless of whether you’ve tracked down a gruit from an international brewery, a brewpub down the street, or brewed your own, be sure to raise a glass to the forgotten beverage on International Gruit Day, celebrated every year on February 1.

Want to learn more about German beers while tracking down these gruits? Check out the Oktoberfest episode of The Manual podcast for more info.

Editors' Recommendations

Lee Heidel
Lee Heidel is the managing editor of Brew/Drink/Run, a website and podcast that promotes brewing your own beer, consuming the…
The FDA is changing its stance on salt substitutes — here’s what a dietitian says you should know
How to reduce your salt intake
Salt with a wooden spoon

If there's one "secret" ingredient that makes anything taste more delicious, it's salt, of course. Well, salt or butter. Usually both. No dish is complete without this miraculous little mineral. After all, where would our French fries, our crispy bacon, our nuts, or deli meats be without salt? And those are just the obvious foods we know and love for their salty goodness.

When you take into account the flavor miracle that salt works on all food, bringing out all of an ingredient's other features like sweetness and tartness, there really isn't anything this little chemical can't do. At least when it comes to flavor. Unfortunately, when it comes to health, salt's positive attributes fall a bit short.

Read more
This recipe finder will give you dinner ideas using what’s in your fridge
Tired of food waste? This site will tell you what to make for dinner using leftover ingredients
Man looking in the fridge.

We've all been there. It's 6:30, you've just gotten home from work, and you stand in front of an open refrigerator, clueless and frustrated. You have no idea what to do with the random ingredients staring back at you. You've been using that beautiful brain all day long and now you have to put on an apron and come up with dinner ideas for you and your family? No thanks.
If you've ever found yourself in this situation, there's now a site for that very problem. It's called Gumbo, and it's a total game-changer. Gumbo takes what you already have in your fridge, and generates tons of recipes using exactly those ingredients. No need for a last-minute trip to the grocery store.

Let's say you open your fridge and see, for example, raw chicken breast, oranges, soy sauce, honey, and green onions. Simply open the Gumbo app and select those items. With one click, dozens of recipes will pop up that feature those ingredients - Healthy Orange Chicken, Zesty Instant Pot Chicken Breasts, Whole Lemon and Honey Chicken Skewers — to name just a few.
No matter how random your assortment of refrigerator finds, Gumbo has a recipe for you. It also can offer recipes that only require one or two additional (yet common) ingredients. Let's say you don't include salt in your search. Chances are, you probably have salt at home. So, if there are recipes that call for everything you selected plus salt, Gumbo will offer that up as an option.
In addition to taking the burden of recipe creation off your plate, Gumbo will also save you money by keeping your food waste in check. A 2020 study from the American Journal of Agricultural Economics found that the average household in the United States wastes 31.9% of its food, or about $1,866 annually. That's an absolutely shocking statistic. But by knowing exactly what to do with the seemingly useless items in our fridge, Gumbo can greatly help cut back on such an enormously wasteful problem.
News of the new app has been spreading over Reddit like wildfire, and people are ecstatic, exclaiming, "Ok this is amazing! I have DREAMT of a site like this and am excited to give it a go! Here's to (hopefully) less food waste!" and "This is freaking amazing! Thank you!!!"
Users of Reddit, we couldn't agree more.

Read more
Pizza Hut brought back an iconic item for March Madness — but you can’t eat it
Be still our nostalgic 90s hearts with this Pizza Hut throwback
pizza hut brings back mini basketballs for march madness 06 satx 027

The 90s have been back for a while now. In fashion, in music, and even in our favorite snack foods. Everywhere you turn, there's a TikTok or YouTube video titled "You might be a 90s kid if..." Grocery store shelves can hardly stay stocked with old-school cool snacks like Waffle Crisp and Dunkaroos, and we millennials couldn't be more ecstatic about it.

Now, Pizza Hut has jumped on the nostalgic bandwagon as well. Coming in hot just after their re-release of 1990s favorite, The Big New Yorker, is another classic Pizza Hut throwback — mini basketballs. Participating restaurants will be selling their 2023 version of mini basketballs starting March 14, just in time for March Madness. The balls feature Pizza Hut's popular catchphrase, "No One Out Pizzas The Hut," in the restaurant's signature red and black color scheme. The cost of revisiting one of your favorite childhood memories will set you back just $7.

Read more