Gruits tend to be understood today as beers that use something other than hops to provide their bittering elements. But that sense of hops as an essential part of beer—alongside water, barley, and yeast, and sometimes a few other things—is a relatively recent one. In The Oxford Companion to Beer’s entry on gruits (written by the reliable Dick Cantwell, and referencing the key text “Sacred and Herbal Healing Beers” by Stephen Harrod Buhner), gruits are described as “a generic term referring to the herb mixtures used to flavor and preserve beer before the general use of hops took hold in the 15^th and 16^th centuries in Europe.” So, 500 years of hop dominance (ballpark) for a beverage that’s been around since (ballpark) at least 7,000 BCE.

Gruit mixtures varied depending upon what was locally available—but common inclusions were sweet gale/bog myrtle, yarrow, and wild rosemary, while all sorts of other ingredients could be included as well: ginger, caraway, juniper, cinnamon… even some hops. While the socio-economic influences that led to the shift away from these (sometimes psychotropic…) ingredients is way past what I could possibly fit into this column space, it’s pretty fascinating for anyone who’d like an herbaceous deep dive into weird beer history.

Gruits are still pretty uncommon on the whole, with some of my favorites over the past 10 years or so being Upright’s Special Herbs (which hasn’t been made in years) and Moonlight Brewing’s gruit-inspired seasonal Working for Tips (which uses fresh redwood branches instead of hops). A recent SF Chronicle cited the efforts of Moonlight, Woods Beer, and Mad Fritz here in the Bay Area as being a local resurgence of gruit—but a lot of the stuff mentioned is either super limited or been around for a while. Gruits are still pretty far out there in our hop-centic beer world today, but they can also offer a neat peak into our past.

A number of beers recently featured in the club have been vintage bottles, picked specifically because they’re drinking at their prime, and it’s had me thinking a lot about cellaring overall lately. I’ll start by saying, despite writing about beer professionally for about a decade, I tend to feel pretty out-there when it comes to discussing beer cellars or beer collections… I have (I checked) literally one bottle of cellared beer right now. It’s in our kitchen cupboard, and I didn’t buy it. Our little wine fridge is focused on younger Pinots and Tablas Creek releases.

This is very much personal preference, and it’s evolved a bit over the years. When we lived in DC and I was trading beer regularly, we at least had a closet full of ageable beer—but that was functionally more of an on-deck circle for the regular tastings our DC crew was hosting. I’ve had some wonderfully aged examples from Hair of the Dog and De Dolle over the years that remind me there’s absolutely positive potential in cellaring beers. But I’ve accepted I just don’t have a taste for oxidation… Nine times out of ten I’m going to prefer that beer fresh.

Same for vintage flights of Pinot. Ditto for aged sherry. Just how these tastebuds are wired.

As such… I’m always curious when people do keep a beer cellar (and not just of IPAs they forgot to drink… you folks know who you are). Where do you fall when it comes to aging beer? Do you keep a cellar? What styles do you like to age? (I’d totally accept a cellar full of lambic…) Have your habits evolved over time? Chime in on Twitter at @RareBeerClub.

Having received a bit of glassware over the holidays, my wife and I recently decided to wade through and reorganize our glass collection. (Most alcohol writers have more glassware than we know what to do with…) We’ve got three spots for glassware in the house: main section in the kitchen, a few windowed shelves in the living room (for wine glasses and snifters, so I can offset having to walk by how fancy I feel), and, thirdly, a nook for backup glassware. We did our best to Marie Kondo it up, trying to be mindful of what actually sparked joy to use.

Some stuff quickly got banished to the backup nook: hefeweizen glasses, the Spiegelau wheat beer glasses (both the shape and size of a rocket ship)… The more interesting part was what made it into the prime kitchen shelves. What was our go-to glassware we used all the time?

Here’s what those two shelves look like for us: A few thin, heavy-bottomed pilsner glasses. Two sets of glassware I designed for the comic—flexible, medium-sized wine goblets, both stemmed and stemless. A few wee and normal-sized nonics. And then the two things that I personally like drinking out of most, for different reasons. The first’s for pragmatic ones: a pair of Riedel Ouverture beer glasses, tulip-like and a perfect combo of nicely thin but thick enough that I haven’t broken them yet. The second are two small chalice glasses from Dieu du Ciel! in Montreal, for more personal reasons. Ali and I snagged these up at the brewery’s 10^th anniversary party back in 2008, when we were roadtripping to the west coast. They’re a little frou-frou and fragile—but they also hit the joy button and we should use them more.

What’s your go-to piece of beer glassware? Do you tend to reach for it because of functional or personal reasons? Are you glassware ambivalent? Chime in on Twitter at @RareBeerClub.