Can You Brew Beer Without Hops? The Answer Really Shocked Me ...

Planning to start brewing your own beer soon? Check out my shop and recommended gear page with all the brewing equipment, recipes and kits I've used in the past as well as some items on my own wish list. Check out the Menu to find out more!
Can You Brew Beer Without Hops? The Answer Really Shocked Me
If you’ve been brewing your own beer for any length of time, you’ve probably already committed its four staple ingredients to memory: water, grains, yeast, hops.
The first three of this Fab Four seem to make total sense. Water makes up about 95% of beer, so no water = no beer.
With no grains, there would be no sugars for the yeast to eat and produce alcohol with.
But have you ever asked yourself whether it’s possible to brew beer without hops?
Being a bit of a history geek, I knew about the reinheitsgebot laws in Germany, but I wanted to find out more about beer before hops.
The truth was completely at odds with what I’ve always taken as a given.
Brewing beer without hops is possible. One ‘beer’ made without hops is called gruit. It is made with a range of botanicals as bittering agents, preservatives, & flavorants. Other hopless beers are spruce beer, using spruce tips instead of hops, and Finnish sahti, spiced with twigs & juniper berries.
While you may be utterly devoted to hopped beer (I know I am!), it’s totally normal to be curious about the hopless versions:
What do they taste like? How do you even make them, and why would you want to?
Plan your next Beer Creation?
What does hopless beer taste like?
As with any beer you brew, the balance between the sweetness of the malt character and the bitterness of the hops (or other bittering agents in this case) character is key to the overall finished product. In this mix, you also have your yeast at play of course.
So, if anything, as brewers we are rather limited in the flavors we can get because we generally only rely on one plant.
Our fore-brewers weren’t that restricted and the drinks they made are a testament to that!
If you want to get a flavor for what people were drinking before hops even came onto the scene, I can really recommend the collaborative book by Patrick E. McGovern and Sam Calagione (of Dogfish Head brewing fame) called “Ancient Brews” (available on Amazon).
One note about spruce beer, though: soft drinks called “spruce beers” exist in some regions where spruce was historically used as a beverage flavorant, notably Newfoundland and Quebec.
“Spruce beer” in these regions could mean the non-alcoholic drink or traditional alcoholic spruce beer.
So if you ever find yourself up north and you want to try a spruce beer, be careful to ask for the right thing!
Do any modern breweries sell hopless beer?
Hopless beers have seen a resurgence in popularity in the last twenty years, and microbreweries have been churning out some interesting hopless brews—on a much less regular schedule than hopped beers, though.
They’re much harder to find than regular hopped beers because mostbeer drinkers aren’t looking for them, which means a lot of vendors aren’t noticing, purchasing, and selling them.
To illustrate, the Beer Advocate database includes 32,576 IPAs and only 273 gruits.
That doesn’t mean low/no hops beers aren’t out there, though! You’ll find a lot of microbreweries have them in their collection but that they’re “not currently available.”
It’s one of those things where you just have to keep your eyes open and your Google search fresh.
To be honest though, most commercially sold beers in the USA will always have some hops in them due to the State and Federal laws brewers have to abide by. So, for the true hopless experience, you’d better brew your own.
Here are a few of the most consistently available no/low hops beer on the market:
For their Historic Ales series, Williams Brothers Brewing Company of Scotland produces a heather ale dating back to 2000 BC called Fraoch.
There’s still hops in it (and in their other Historic Ale offerings) but much less than in a contemporary brew. And most importantly, these ales are all made with botanicals gathered by the brewery itself.
Garrison Brewing Company of Nova Scotia produces a spruce beer on a rotating/seasonal basis that’s a real crowd pleaser.
Traditional hopless sahti is best (and most easily) experienced in Finland itself, but you’ll find plenty of breweries putting their own spins on the drink, including Dogfish Head’s Sah’Tea.
I good beginner book which also has a spruce beer recipe (though it does have hops in it) is Greg Hughes’ “Home Brew Beer“.
Making sahti
When it comes to making your own sahti, you’ll have to get your head in a different “brew space” than you’re used to.
Sahti is the oldest beer style on earth, and brewing an authentic version of it is very process dependent. That means some of the processes involved in making this unique beer are going to feel totally wrong to you if you’ve ever made modern beer, but you need to stick with them.
On the other hand, most modern brewing equipment will work for making a sahti (Thankfully! It’d be hard to get a wooden vat and a kuurna).
The ingredients list also doesn’t need to match precisely with that of a Finnish sahti-maker, either. Again, it’s the process that’s key to getting sahti.
Brewing Nordic has an excellent comprehensive sahti recipe. While it’s not something a total beginner might want to attempt, it doesn’t seem too daunting to brew for someone with a few more kegs under their belt.
Why would you choose to make beer without hops?
You and I may love the taste of hoppy beer, but not everyone does. For those people, sometimes the only thing holding them back from beer enjoyment is the presence of hops.
Some people are also allergic to hops, so beer is normally off the menu for them for health reasons. Present them with a hopless brew, though, and they can get in on the fun.
Speaking of fun, maybe the only thing more fun than homebrewing your own beer is homebrewing something totally new. Going no/low hops can make it feel like your first time brewing again!
Is it technically “beer” if it doesn’t have hops?
Why wouldn’t it be? If hops were integral to beer, wouldn’t that make an IPA more “beery” than a lager?
When it comes to the modern beer market though, some laws require the presence of hops in a beverage in order to market it as “beer.”
This is reminiscent of the 1516 Bavarian law Reinheitsgebot (“purity order”) that restricted the ingredients of beer to no more or less than water, barley, and hops.
Yeast was present too, but it wasn’t until the 19th century that scientist first understood what it was, then told us brewers I suppose.
A great book about this and how to brew beer which adhere to this 500 year law, check out Dave Carpenter’s book ‘Lager‘ which is a great read. (link to Amazon).
Anyway, in general ‘down the pub’ terms, I think we can still call it beer even even if no hops are added.
When did people first add hops to beer, anyway?
The first recorded use of hops dates back to the 9th century. Prior to that, gruit was king (or queen, considering it was usually made by women).
Only in the 1200s did hops really start to compete with gruit when—in some parts of Europe—if the nobility taxed hops, brewers switched to gruit. If gruit was taxed, they hopped back over to hops.
Like most things, when hop farming began to make profit for land owners, laws came into effect, like the Reinheitsgebot in Germany and other laws in other countries, which shifted the entire industry onto a distinct hops footing.
It’s up to use homebrewers to experiment and keep the old pre-9th century beer styles alive and well.
Recent Posts
As every good homebrewer knows, our favorite beer is created when yeast chows down on some lovely sugary wort, producing alcohol and carbon dioxide. So, if all we need is sugar, does that mean we can...
About Phil
Hey! My name is Phil and I'm the creator of Beercreation.com. I have a passion for everything beer related. I've had the great fortune of tasting and now trying to brew some of the best beer recipes from around the world. On this blog, I'm dedicated to answering your questions (and many of my own) on how to brew beer to enjoy with friends and family. Cheers!
LEGAL INFORMATION
This site is owned and operated by the founder of BeerCreation.com. BeerCreation.com is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to Amazon.com. BeerCreation.com also participates in affiliate programs with Clickbank, CJ, ShareASale, and other sites. BeerCreation.com is compensated for referring traffic and business to these companies.