Why Beer Has Hops: Mugwort, Gruit and the Economics of Flavor

From The Back Burner, No. 2 · the full story behind this week's letter · Last Updated: November 12, 2026

Hops replaced mugwort and the other old ale herbs because they made beer cheaper to brew, longer to keep, easier to standardize and, on the Continent, free of an herb tax. Not one of those reasons is a flavor. The bitter, aromatic ales that came before were not beaten in a taste test; they lost on a balance sheet.

For most of brewing's history, the bitterness and aroma in a pot of ale came from whatever plants a region had to hand. In the Low Countries that meant a licensed herb mixture called gruit. In England, according to Maud Grieve's 1931 A Modern Herbal, it often meant mugwort (Artemisia vulgaris), gathered in flower, dried and boiled with malt liquor1. Then a climbing vine from the hemp family arrived with a set of advantages no herb could match, and within a few centuries the old flavors were gone from the tankard.

Shelf life sits at the center of this story, and it still decides how dried herbs taste today; our guide to buying and storing herbs in bulk covers the jars, light and timing that keep aromatics in the leaf. Below, we lay out what the historical record actually supports, where the popular version of this story overreaches, and how to taste what the brewers gave up, using the lab-tested mugwort on our own shelf.

Why Did Hops Replace Mugwort and the Old Ale Herbs?

Hops replaced the old ale herbs because hopped beer needed less grain, kept for months instead of days, came from a cultivated crop and, in the Low Countries, sat outside the taxed gruit monopoly; brewers chose it for cost and logistics, not taste.

Mugwort (Artemisia vulgaris) is an aromatic perennial in the daisy family (Asteraceae) traditionally used to flavour ale before hops and to season rich meats, characterized by a bitter, camphor-scented volatile oil rich in 1,8-cineole, sabinene and thujone.2

The archaeobotanist Karl-Ernst Behre, reviewing the European evidence for beer additives, found that hops were being cultivated by about AD 859, that hopped and herb-flavored beers competed hard through the late Middle Ages, and that hops did not finally win across Europe until the eighteenth century3. That is a long, slow contest, and it was decided by brewers and tax collectors rather than by drinkers. If you want the plant that won, our full hops guide, from vine to vessel is the counterpoint to everything below.

What Was Gruit, and Where Was It Brewed?

Gruit was the herb mixture used to flavor and preserve beer in the Low Countries and western Germany, built around bog myrtle, and the right to sell it was a licensed monopoly that worked like a tax on every brew.

The brewing historian Susan Verberg traced gruit through Dutch and German city accounts. The herbs named most often are bog myrtle (Myrica gale) or, outside bog myrtle's range, marsh rosemary, along with laurel berries and resin; the first written mention of gruit comes from Bommel in a charter of Otto III around 9994. Behre's archaeobotanical record suggests bog myrtle may already have been used in brewing at the Rhine estuary around the time of Christ3.

What made gruit unusual was the paperwork. The gruitrecht, the right to supply it, belonged first to counts and bishops, who leased or granted it, and later to towns that ran it as an excise on brewing. Delft received it in 1274. Zwolle took it over in 1404 when the Bishop of Utrecht could not repay a loan. Amsterdam was the last to buy its right, from Philip II in 1559, for 4,500 pounds. The system was not abolished in the Netherlands until 17984. Every brewer who wanted to make gruit ale paid whoever held the right.

Mugwort in English Ale: What the Record Actually Says

The clearest record of mugwort as an English ale herb comes from Maud Grieve's 1931 herbal, which describes it gathered in flower, dried and boiled with malt liquor, and an older Flemish herbal that says it kept beer from souring.

"used to a great extent for flavouring beer before the introduction of hops"Maud Grieve, A Modern Herbal (1931), on mugwort

Grieve also recorded how it was done. The plant was gathered when in flower and dried, because the fresh herb was thought unsuitable; malt liquor was then boiled with it into a strong decoction, and that liquid was added to the beer1. She noted that cottagers in some parts of the country were still flavoring their table beer with it within living memory, and she repeated the old suggestion that the name itself comes from flavoring drinks, the "mug" in mugwort. She was careful to add the competing theory, that the word comes from moughte, an old word for a moth1.

A much earlier witness supports the brewing use. Verberg cites the Flemish physician Rembert Dodoens (Dodonaeus), who wrote in 1554 that mugwort kept beer from souring when it was hung in or cast into the vat5. That is the same job hops would later do far better.

Here is where the popular version needs care. Martyn Cornell, the beer historian who writes as Zythophile, points out that "gruit" was a Dutch word, never used historically in Britain, and that much medieval English ale was made with no hops and often no herbs at all6. Herbs were used, he argues, usually one at a time rather than as a licensed blend. The best-known English herb-ale recipes, two written down in the Paston family papers around 1430, do not use mugwort: one hangs sage, wood avens, rosemary and thyme in a bag in the barrel with a fresh egg, which the writer believed kept the ale from going sour, and the other uses cloves, mace and spikenard6. So mugwort was one English ale herb among several, best documented by Grieve, not a national standard.

Mugwort did not disappear when it left the tankard. It moved to the kitchen and the apothecary shelf, and today it is better known as a dream and ritual herb; our article on mugwort's second life as a dream herb picks up that thread.

Yarrow and Juniper: The Other Documented Ale Herbs

Yarrow and juniper both have a documented place in old northern European brewing, but in different regions from mugwort, and the evidence for each is narrower than many modern gruit recipes suggest.

Yarrow (Achillea millefolium) belongs to the Scandinavian and Anglo-Saxon ale traditions. Verberg found Scandinavian brewers combining hops with bog myrtle, yarrow and pine resin, but she notes that yarrow does not appear in the Dutch or German gruit city accounts at all45. Cornell describes it as a pre-hop bittering and aromatic herb with a reputation in Scandinavia for strong ale6. Our yarrow guide covers the rest of this daisy-family cousin's long history.

Juniper (Juniperus communis) appears in the Cologne gruit accounts of 1391 and 1393 under a name Verberg reads as juniper, and it remains traditional in Norwegian farmhouse brewing46. Cornell found little or no evidence that British brewers used it, though he suspects some did6. For the berry's culinary side, from gin to game, see our juniper berry guide.

The Old Ale Herbs and the One That Replaced Them

Bog myrtle, yarrow, juniper and mugwort each flavored northern European ale in their own regions; hops displaced all four by the eighteenth century, region by region.

Four Reasons Hops Won, and None of Them Was Taste

Hops won on four practical grounds: more beer from the same grain, months of shelf life, a cultivated and tradeable crop, and, on the Continent, an escape from the gruit tax; flavor was never the argument.

1. More beer from the same grain

Unhopped ale kept only if it was brewed strong, and strength meant malt, the most expensive thing in the brewhouse. Hops let a brewer make a lighter beer that still kept. Reginald Scot, writing his hop-garden manual in the 1570s, claimed a bushel of malt yielded 8 to 9 gallons of ale but 18 to 20 gallons of good beer47. Scot was promoting hops, so read the exact figures with some caution, but the direction is not in doubt. London's records show it: in 1574 the city had 58 ale breweries and 32 beer breweries, yet the beer brewers were using about four times as much malt7.

2. Months of shelf life instead of days

Herbal ale soured fast and was mostly drunk where it was made. Hopped beer could be stored for months, which meant it could be shipped, and the brewers who adopted it turned beer into an export trade5. The microbiology is now well understood. Sakamoto and Konings showed that hop compounds, mainly iso-alpha acids, act against the Gram-positive lactic acid bacteria that sour beer by collapsing the pH gradient across their cell membranes8. Mugwort, by Dodonaeus's account, slowed souring; hops all but stopped the commonest kind.

3. A crop, not a hedgerow

Gruit herbs such as bog myrtle grew wild in bogs and heaths. Hops became a field crop: a perennial vine planted once and cropped year after year, with English growing manuals in print by 1557 and 15745. A cultivated crop can be traded by weight, graded and priced, which suits a brewer working at scale. Verberg links hopped beer directly to the professionalization of brewing4.

4. The tax nobody had written for hops

On the Continent, gruit carried its licence fee into every barrel. Hops did not, at first. Holland began allowing hopped beer, and taxing it, in the early 1320s, and by 1364 the Bishop of Utrecht was complaining that his gruit income had fallen4. The pattern ran the other way in England later on: once hops themselves were taxed, the 1711 hop duty act banned broom as a bittering substitute, so brewers could not dodge the levy by reaching back to the hedgerow6. White horehound was still being used as a bittering herb in English beer in the 1730s6; our horehound guide tells that bitter story.

1483 and the Long English Holdout

England held out against hops longer than its continental neighbors: in 1483 London's ale brewers insisted ale be made only of water, malt and yeast, and hop-free ale survived in English kitchens into the 1600s.

Hopped beer first reached England from the Low Countries in the 1360s and stayed largely in immigrant hands for about a century5. By 1440 an English dictionary was already defining beer as the hopped drink and ale as the unhopped one5. In 1483, London's ale brewers persuaded the city that ale should be brewed the old way, with no hops, herbs or other like thing, but only "licour, malt and yeste"69. Note what that rule excluded: herbs as well as hops. In London, at least, the fight was between plain ale and hopped beer.

English drinkers also said plainly which they preferred. In 1542 the physician Andrew Boorde wrote that "Ale for an Englysshman is a naturall drynke," and called beer the natural drink of a Dutchman7. The market overruled him anyway. Hop gardens were established in Kent in the early sixteenth century5, and by the late 1500s beer brewers dominated London's malt purchases. Ale held on in the countryside: in 1615 Gervase Markham could still write that the general practice was to put no hops in ale at all7.

A word of honesty about a line you may have seen repeated: England was a late adopter, a full century behind Holland, but it was not the last holdout in Europe. Behre's review shows herb-flavored beer surviving in parts of northern Europe until hops finally won everywhere in the eighteenth century3.

Mugwort by the Numbers

Mugwort is a caffeine-free, bitter-aromatic Asteraceae herb whose volatile oil is led by 1,8-cineole, and our current lot carries a published lab record with every result inside its release limit.

What Good Mugwort Looks, Smells and Tastes Like

Good mugwort is green to brown-green with silvery undersides on the leaf pieces, smells sharply herbal and camphor-sweet as soon as the bag opens, and tastes bitter first, then faintly sweet; a stale lot looks dull brown and smells of dust.

The bag tasting notes on our current mugwort read Squid Ink, Grass, Honey. It is an unusual set, and an honest one. "Squid ink" is the savory, almost briny depth under the bitterness; "grass" is the green, sappy note of the dried leaf; "honey" is the soft sweetness that arrives at the very end of a cup. The lab report for lot MWH5202 describes the color as green to brown-green and both aroma and taste as bitter, slightly sweet and herbal, which is the same profile in plainer words10.

Rub a pinch between your fingers. The sharp, camphor-and-eucalyptus lift you smell is the volatile oil, led by 1,8-cineole, with thujone and camphor behind it2. Thujone is the same compound that made mugwort's cousin wormwood infamous; our deep dive on thujone and the absinthe revolution separates the chemistry from the legend. If you have to crush the leaf hard to smell anything, the oil has evaporated and the lot is past its best, the same problem that drove brewers to hops. Those aromatics are secondary metabolites, the class of plant chemistry we believe living soil pushes higher, which is why we judge every herb we carry by its nose as well as its lab report.

Beyond Organic is Sacred Plant Co's regenerative standard that exceeds USDA certification by measuring living soil biology rather than the mere absence of synthetic inputs.

Who buys mugwort today tells you how far it has traveled from the brewhouse. Of the last 100 Sacred Plant Co orders that included mugwort (July 6 to November 10, 2026), 28 also included mullein leaf and 24 included damiana, the classic companions in dream and smoking blends. Only 3 included hops, 9 included yarrow and 1 included juniper. The herb that once flavored English ale now leaves our shelf mostly beside mullein leaf. If you would rather grow your own, start with growing mugwort from seed.

How to Taste What the Brewers Gave Up

Brew a cup of mugwort and a cup of hops side by side, then taste each with something rich; you will taste the trade the brewers made, with no alcohol involved. This is a tea tasting, not a brewing recipe. It takes ten minutes and two teacups.

How much mugwort to use in a cup

For a single cup of tea, about 1 teaspoon of cut and sifted mugwort steeped for 5 minutes is plenty; it is strongly bitter, so start with half a teaspoon if you are new to it, and keep it an occasional cup. In the kitchen, a teaspoon of dried mugwort in the stuffing for a goose or duck is the traditional German use. Because the herb contains thujone, we do not suggest long daily use or concentrated extracts, and mugwort essential oil is not for drinking.

Is Mugwort Safe to Drink?

Mugwort tea in culinary amounts is a long-standing tradition, but it is not for everyone: avoid it during pregnancy or breastfeeding and if you are allergic to ragweed or other daisy-family plants.

Contraindications

Pregnancy and breastfeeding. Mugwort has a long history of use to bring on menstruation and labor, and historical sources even describe it being used to cause miscarriage2. Do not drink it if you are pregnant, trying to conceive or nursing.

Daisy-family and pollen allergies. Mugwort pollen is a well-known hay fever trigger, and a twentieth-century assessment judged the herb unsuitable for medicinal use because of its high allergic potential2. If you react to ragweed, chamomile, yarrow or other Asteraceae plants, skip it.

Thujone. Thujone made up 13.5% of the aerial-part oil in one analysis2. How much reaches a cup of tea is not well measured, so keep mugwort an occasional cup, and anyone with a seizure disorder, and anyone taking prescription medication, should check with their practitioner first.

For the hops cup in the tasting. If you are pregnant or nursing, or take sedatives or sleep medication, check with your practitioner before drinking hop tea.

Traditional and Energetic Considerations

In Western herbal tradition mugwort is classed as a bitter aromatic, the kind of herb served alongside heavy food, which is how it came to season goose and fatty pork in German and central European kitchens. Grieve describes its leaves being collected in August and dried in the same manner as its relative wormwood1. Those traditions describe how the herb has been used; they are not a substitute for the safety points above.

Questions People Ask About Hops, Gruit and Mugwort

The Same Trade, Made Again

Flavor lost the vote on beer, and nobody asked the drinkers. It was not the last time. Modern supermarket tomatoes are the clearest recent case: breeders selected for size, firmness and uniform ripening because those traits suit harvesting and shipping, and the flavor quietly went with them. A 2012 study traced one culprit, the uniform-ripening trait, selected so a field's fruit looks evenly light green and can be picked at once, which also lowered the ripe fruit's sugar11. A 2017 study that sequenced 398 modern, heirloom and wild tomatoes found 13 flavor-associated compounds significantly reduced in modern varieties compared with heirlooms12. Cost, shelf life and consistency won again, exactly as they did when hops replaced mugwort. The tomato deserves a letter of its own. Last week's letter, on why black licorice rarely tastes of licorice root, is a smaller version of the same story.

Thank You For Being You,
The Sacred Plant Co Crew

References

1. Grieve M. A Modern Herbal. London: Jonathan Cape; 1931. Entry: Mugwort (Artemisia vulgaris). botanical.com
2. Ekiert H, Pajor J, Klin P, Rzepiela A, Ślesak H, Szopa A. Significance of Artemisia vulgaris L. (Common Mugwort) in the History of Medicine and Its Possible Contemporary Applications Substantiated by Phytochemical and Pharmacological Studies. Molecules. 2020;25(19):4415. mdpi.com
3. Behre K-E. The history of beer additives in Europe: a review. Vegetation History and Archaeobotany. 1999;8(1):35-48. doi:10.1007/BF02042841
4. Verberg S. The Rise and Fall of Gruit. Brewery History. 2018;174:46-79. breweryhistory.com
5. Verberg S. From Herbal to Hopped Beer: The Displacement of Regional Herbal Beer Traditions by Commercial Export Brewing in Medieval Europe. Brewery History. 2020;183:9-23. breweryhistory.com
6. Cornell M. Was it ever Gruit Britain? The herb ale tradition. Zythophile; February 28, 2014. zythophile.co.uk
7. Cornell M. Why Shakespeare liked ale but didn't like beer. Zythophile; February 12, 2014. Includes Andrew Boorde, A Compendyous Regyment or a Dyetary of Helth (1542), and Reginald Scot, A Perfite Platforme of a Hoppe Garden (1574). zythophile.co.uk
8. Sakamoto K, Konings WN. Beer spoilage bacteria and hop resistance. International Journal of Food Microbiology. 2003;89(2-3):105-124. doi:10.1016/S0168-1605(03)00153-3
9. Cornell M. Myth two: hops were forbidden by Henry VI. Zythophile. On the 1483 London ale brewers' petition. zythophile.co.uk
10. Sacred Plant Co. Certificate of Analysis, Mugwort lot MWH5202. PDF; and How to Read a Certificate of Analysis. sacredplantco.com
11. Powell ALT, Nguyen CV, Hill T, et al. Uniform ripening encodes a Golden 2-like transcription factor regulating tomato fruit chloroplast development. Science. 2012;336(6089):1711-1715.
12. Tieman D, Zhu G, Resende MFR Jr, et al. A chemical genetic roadmap to improved tomato flavor. Science. 2017;355(6323):391-394. doi:10.1126/science.aal1556

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