The History of Beer Before Hops: 7,000 Years of Brewing

Published April 2026 · 9-minute read · by Rich, founder of Unhopped

When most people picture beer's history, they picture monks in Belgian abbeys, medieval English alewives, and the rise of German lager. But beer is far older than any of that — older than wine, older than written history in most regions, possibly older than agriculture itself. And for most of that history, hops were irrelevant.

Beer in the ancient world

Mesopotamia: the first written beer recipe

The earliest direct evidence for beer brewing comes from the Sumerian city of Godin Tepe (modern Iran), around 3500 BCE — chemical residues in pottery vessels show fermented barley. By around 1800 BCE, the Sumerians had a hymn to Ninkasi (the goddess of beer) that doubles as a brewing recipe — the oldest known written instructions for making beer. It involves twice-baked bread (bappir), barley, water, and natural fermentation. Hops are nowhere to be found.

Mesopotamian beer was likely flavoured with date syrup or honey for sweetness, possibly with herbs for character. It was sometimes drunk communally through long reed straws — the straws filtered out the unfiltered grain solids floating on top.

Ancient Egypt: beer as daily food

Egyptian brewing dates from at least 3000 BCE. Beer was so central to Egyptian life that workers building the pyramids were paid partly in daily beer rations. Egyptian beer was thicker than modern beer — more like a fermented porridge — and was flavoured with various herbs and dates. Again: no hops. The Egyptian word for 'meal' (in the food sense) is closely related to the word for beer.

Beyond Mesopotamia and Egypt

Independent beer traditions emerged across the ancient world: chicha (maize beer) in pre-Columbian South America; nipa (palm-sap beer) in ancient China; various sorghum and millet beers across sub-Saharan Africa. None of these used hops, because hops only grew wild in specific temperate northern climates and weren't cultivated as a brewing ingredient until much later.

Beer in the Roman world

The Romans had a complicated relationship with beer. Wine was the civilised drink of the Mediterranean elite; beer (cervisia) was what the 'barbarian' northern Europeans drank. Roman writers including Pliny the Elder describe beer with mild contempt — but acknowledge its widespread use across Gaul, Britain, and the Germanic frontier. None of these regional beers were hopped.

Pliny's Natural History (around 77 CE) does mention Humulus lupulus — the hop plant — but as a wild salad vegetable, not a brewing ingredient. The earliest known reference to hops being deliberately used in beer comes from a Carolingian monastic record from around 822 CE — nearly 800 years later.

Early medieval Europe: gruit takes over

The rise of monastic brewing

After the fall of the Western Roman Empire, brewing in Europe became increasingly centralised in monasteries. Benedictine and Cistercian monks brewed beer for their own consumption, for travellers, and as a sustaining drink during fasts. The Plan of St Gall — a 9th-century Carolingian monastery layout — shows three separate brewhouses, indicating just how central brewing had become to monastic life.

Most monastic beer of this period was unhopped. Bittering and preservation came from gruit — the herbal mixture that dominated European brewing through the early and high medieval period. For more on gruit specifically, see our complete guide to gruit beer.

The gruit monopoly economy

Gruit wasn't just a brewing ingredient — it was a tax structure. The right to produce and sell gruit (the gruitrecht) was typically held by the local bishop, prince, or city authority, and represented a significant source of revenue. Brewers were legally required to buy their gruit from the local gruithaus rather than make their own.

This meant that the eventual replacement of gruit by hops wasn't just a brewing-technology shift — it was an economic and political revolution. Hops grew freely; you couldn't monopolise and tax them the same way.

Hops emerge: 1100-1600

Hildegard of Bingen documents hops, 1150

Saint Hildegard of Bingen, the 12th-century German abbess and polymath, is one of the earliest writers to describe hops being used deliberately in beer. In her work Physica (around 1150), she notes that hops 'make the soul of a man sad and weigh down his inner organs' — not exactly an enthusiastic endorsement — but acknowledges that they were being added to beer for their preservative effects.

The Hanseatic export trade

The decisive turning point for hops came with the rise of the Hanseatic League in the 13th and 14th centuries. Hopped beer kept longer than gruit ale — long enough to be brewed in Hamburg or Bremen and shipped to England, Scandinavia, or the Baltic. By the late 1300s, Hamburg alone was exporting hundreds of thousands of barrels of hopped beer annually.

This created economic pressure that local gruit-based brewing industries struggled to resist. Local brewers either adopted hops themselves or lost market share to imports.

England's slow conversion

England held out longer than most of Europe. Traditional English 'ale' (unhopped) and the newer continental-style 'beer' (hopped) were treated as legally distinct products well into the 16th century. Hopped beer was initially viewed with suspicion as a 'Dutch' or 'Flemish' novelty. But by the late Tudor period, hops had largely won — a transition driven by the same pressures of preservation, trade, and economics that had reshaped continental brewing.

The Reformation accelerates the shift

The 16th-century Protestant Reformation weakened Church-held gruit monopolies across northern Europe and gave reformist political leaders additional incentive to promote hopped beer. There's scholarly debate about how directly religious reformers pushed hopped beer (some sources overstate the connection) — but the broader political shift away from Catholic economic structures did weaken the institutions that had defended gruit.

The Reinheitsgebot, 1516

The Bavarian Reinheitsgebot ('purity law') of 1516 limited beer ingredients to barley, water, and hops — effectively outlawing gruit and other herb-flavoured beers in the German-speaking world. The law had multiple motivations (food security, tax simplification, protection of Bavarian brewers from imports), but one clear effect was to codify hops as the only acceptable bittering agent in German brewing for centuries to come.

What does this history mean today?

For most of beer's history — possibly 7,000 years out of 9,000 — beer was made without hops. The hop-dominated brewing we now consider standard is, in historical terms, a relatively recent and geographically narrow tradition. It became the global norm partly through brewing-quality improvements (preservation, consistency) and partly through political and economic forces (trade routes, monopoly-breaking, Reformation politics).

A small but growing community of modern brewers has begun returning to pre-hop traditions — brewing gruit ales, recreating sahti, experimenting with juniper and heather. International Gruit Day (February 1st) has grown from a niche celebration to a recognised international event. The history of beer before hops is, increasingly, also part of beer's future.

For a deeper look at the surviving and revived unhopped traditions, see our guide to beer without hops and the hub article What Is Unhopped Beer? A Complete Guide to Beer Without Hops.

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