>>16111448Until the early 2000s you could buy "asthma cigarettes" here in every pharmacy. It was an old medicine, going back to the 19th century and before. Every cigarette contained 1 gram of camphorated Datura stramonium leaves. And as youngsters back then we knew that if you smoked 2 or 3 of these astma cigarettes after each other, you'd get sedated and have strange dreams.
Messing with strong anticholinergics (datura, belladonna, henbane...) is pretty dangerous, but in small doses they can be pretty useful as a sedative or mild sleeping aid. Or in case of allergies or when you've catched a cold.
Datura-induced hallucinations are indeed "real'', like smoking cigarettes which are not there. It also affects your eyesight badly for days, even weeks after.
>>16111452Hops only became standard after the Reinheitsgebot in the 16th century in the HRE, when I am we weren,t part of the HRE in those days. I have an issue with hops because they are so estrogenic. Even in the old days, the women that picked the hops bells, it affected their periods and messed up their hormone cycle.
Gruut is made from a shrub that grows on heathland, when you rub its flowers there's a very pleasant spicy smell, and the taste is bitter. It used to flourish here, but with the draining of marshes and changing of environment, the plant is now rare (but can be cultivated in specific conditions).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Callunahttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GruitNow we again have breweries that use gruut instead of hops, for example:
https://www.gruut.be/en/We also have whitebeers that used wormwood instead of hops. Wormwood can perfectly substitute for hops and eliminates the estrogen problem, the reason that people develop mantits and beer bellies (in france their alcoholics drink wine and are skinny nervous types).
We have some funny medieval beer recipes here. Some are green in color.
