Man had grown hops in his garden since early history; for example, ancient Greek and Roman writers mention their cultivation before 1000 BC.
The earliest record of deliberate hop cultivation in Europe was at the Abbey of St. Denis in 768 AD.
The hop garden called a humlonaria, was a gift from the ruler of the Franks Pepin le Bref. Hops were also cultivated at the Abbey of St. Germain-Des-Pres and at the Abbey of Corvey-sur-le- Wesser in the ninth century.
There is evidence that as early as around 800 AD, German monasteries were adding extracts of the hop plant to preserve their beer longer. More over the bitterness of the hops also balanced the rather sweet flavour of the malt, the other main ingredient of Germanics beer.
By the year 820 hops and brewing were part of every monastery. The beer brewed by the monks was sued for their own consumption, as well as to be given to pilgrims and the poor. Hops were so highly valued that they could be used in lieu of hard currency to pay rent.
Some sources credit St. Hildegarde with the first use of hops in beer in Europe. St. Hildegarde is given credit because she wrote about hop usage two centuries after hops cultivation is documented in monasteries. St. Hildegarde, who was a Sponheim, was a famous aristocratic family.
In her Physica Sacra was a natural history and included essentially all of the plants of any significance in her part of the world. In these writings, she described the benefit to health that could be obtained by boiling hops in beer wort.
The use of hops in beer spread slowly and irregularly thorough out Europe. Westphalia, Bremen, Hamburg and Eastern Europe, began to use hops in the twelve century AD.
First use of hops
