>>52149288Throughout the middle ages, flavored beer was extremely common, with all sorts of fruits, honey, spices, and other sweeteners employed to cut the harshness of the hops and make the drink sweeter as people liked sweet drinks back then just as much as they do today. Local breweries often produced varieties of beer without any hops, which wouldn't have as long a shelf life but also were naturally not bitter. The Beer Purity Laws of the modern era -- meaning beer should be made solely from water, barley, yeast, and hops -- came about from German and Anglo puritans during the Protestant Revolution. They believed that flavorful beer was sinful and destroyed all such breweries in all the territories they controlled. Eventually it fell out of fashion because of their cultural influence around the continent. The more you know!
