Beer Spotlight!

Wheatland Spring Natural Remedy, Batch #2

$17.99 for the 750ml bottle
Open-fermented Gruit Ale with Honey

This fact may come as a surprise to many craft beer fans, but beer brewing is older than hops.

Well, actually, no, it isn’t. Hops have been around for … we don’t know … thousands of years? It’s a plant. It’s not like ex-Nazi scientists created them in Los Alamos in the 40s. What we mean to say is that people were brewing beer long before they discovered that hops seemed to be Watchmaker-Creator-made to be their bittering solution.

Before the discovery of hops (and even after), brewers countered the sweet malts in their beers with different plants and plant extracts (botanicals). In Medieval Europe there were beers brewed with a particular set of botanicals that were collectively called “gruit” (bog myrtle, yarrow, and wild rosemary — according to one beer-storian). Thus, since it is the raison d’être of American craft brewers to uncover, resurrect, and mess with every obscure beer style, it should bring no surprise to find them concocting their own herbal cocktails and calling the ales they apply them to “Gruit Ales.” That’s what brings us to Wheatland Spring Farm + Brewery’s second batch of their Natural Remedy Gruit Ale.

Wheatland Spring Farm + Brewery is outside of Wheatland, VA, north of Purcellville with West VA on one side and Maryland on the other. All of the grains malted for this brew are grown in VA. Twenty-five percent of them are grown at Wheatland Spring Farm itself. They use honey from a neighbor’s bees and ferment the beer using yeast that they snagged in their east field (!). Finally, Batch #2’s gruit recipe contains elderflower, lemon verbena, pineapple sage, rosemary, and Holy Basil. Wheatland Spring then barrel-ages the beer before bottle conditioning it.

For a beer that Wheaton Spring open-fermented, we are astounded that the Natural Remedy is as smooth as it is. We were ready for a funky, herbal explosion and, instead, found a subtle, flavorful, sipper. The honey, the sage, the rosemary — all of them are very quiet, merging into a brew that was on its way to being tart but then figured it was just too darn hot to bother and settled for a light citrus haze.

Will you be so taken by this brew’s quiet delights that you won’t even miss hops? We’d bet the farm on it.