The Beer Bible

Porters jump seas and become stouts; pilsners cross borders and become hellesbiers. Places like the United States, Italy, and France pick up brewing almost from nothing and rebuild it like immigrants do, borrowing this, dumping that, scrambling x and y. Styles mutate and change

Culture and history exert at least as great an influence as where the barley and hops are grown.

In the eleventh century, almost no beer was made with hops; a thousand years later, almost no beer is made without them.

As the Benedictine abbess Hildegard of Bingen noted, they act as a preservative, and this had two important effects. Hops allowed breweries to do more with their recipes, like making stronger beer (without hops, strong beer would turn to vinegar before it was done conditioning)

Emperor Otto II began to grant the right to collect the tax to loyal nobles or even to towns and this is the context in which the word “gruit” was introduced; the right to provide it was called the gruitrecht

the word “bridal,” for example, derives from the Anglo-Saxon bry¯d-ealo (“bride ale,” which actually refers to the celebratory fest, not just the beer).

Malt is principally sweet, but roasted malt may be bitter like coffee. Malt gives beer the scent and flavor of bread, cracker, nuts, toffee, dark fruit, or chocolate—to name just a few.