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Chapter  The Spread of Hopped Beer Brewing: The Southern Low Countries, England, and Scandinavia Once Dutch brewers began to make hopped beer and sell it outside the county, the use of hops became popular, and even necessary, not just in Holland but also in nearby jurisdictions. The count of Holland made concessions on the use of hops rather early compared to his counterparts in the region of the lower Rhine where gruit was in widespread use. Changes in the law allowing brewers to use hops came in the second half of the fourteenth century in Flanders, Brabant, Utrecht, and Liege, all just to the south and east of the county of Holland. Changes in brewing practice followed, often slowly. Shifting to brewing with hops was always done with the permission, if not the support, of the local and regional authorities. In  the bishop of Liege and Utrecht acknowledged that over the previous thirty to fifty years a new way of making beer had become known which used an herb called hops. In the following year he levied a tax on hopped beer, with the permission of the emperor, and that was the first time he allowed people living in his lands to use the plant. He did insist that the tax paid be equivalent to what he had received before on the same volume of beer. As a result of the change, Liege brewers did so well that the town prohibited them from trading in money, that is in speculating in foreign exchange. In Flanders just a few years later, in , the holders of the gruit tax even got the count to levy a new tax on imported beer, beer which was typically made with hops. The count’s willingness to comply can be traced to the  percent of the new levy which he received.1 In the same year Bruges got the owner of gruitrecht, Jan van Gruuthuse , to release brewers from compulsory purchase of gruit. The most important result was that they were then able to make hopped beer. In exchange, van Gruuthuse, whose family had gotten the name and wealth from ownership of gruitrecht, got a fee for each barrel of any kind of beer brewed in Bruges. In Brabant in  the count agreed to the levying of a tax on beer made with hops at ’s-Hertogenbosch. The grant appears to have applied throughout the county. At Diest brewers began to use hops at about the same time in imita-  Chapter  tion of German brewers but now also in imitation of Holland brewers. In the town, gardens formerly used to raise grapes for wine were turned over to hops. Though the gruit disappeared, the tax on beer retained the name gruitrecht. By the last quarter of the fourteenth century, brewers at Namur made beer with hops and early in the following century brewers in towns like Kortrijk and Lier made hopped beer in competition with imports from Holland.2 In general in towns in Westphalia, as earlier in Holland, Hamburg hopped beer had trouble making inroads because of the threat it posed to tax income for local authorities. They, in reaction, set up restrictions on imports. They also restricted or prevented local brewers from making beer with hops. Some German lords held out prohibiting the use of hops for a century or more after the count of Holland made his about-face. At Dortmund brewers still used gruit in , but by  they had gone over to hops.3 As late as , the archbishop of Cologne, since he held gruitrecht, tried to suppress the use of hops completely. Finally, in  he did agree to take a rent in lieu of his right to tax gruit and then allowed the import and sale of hopped beer. It was not until the middle of the fifteenth century that a brewery outside of Nuremburg had taken up the use of hops which, along with evidence from Flanders and the Rhineland, suggests the new method of making beer only slowly worked its way south.4 Southern Low Countries Beer Imports Flanders and Brabant had been the logical goals of Hamburg exporters in the years around , and those were the logical places for fifteenth-century Dutch beer makers to find buyers for the hopped beers they produced. Flanders would remain the most important market for Dutch exports for some time. The replacement of German beer in the southern Netherlands in the late fourteenth century was a powerful motor for the expansion of...

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