Medicinal Alcohols

In my research, I've stumbled across this book called Sacred and Herbal Healing Beers. Of primary interest to myself is the use of herbals to make medicinal drinks. In herbalism, plant medicine is stronger when put into alcohol. Many herbal plants today are soaked in distilled alcohols to make extracts. However, distilled alcohol wasn't available two hundred years ago, and many people would put the herbs into their beer or other alcohols. For simplicity sake he calls everything a beer even if they wouldn't be called a beer by the native culture.

For those not in the know, what we know as beer today is commonly made from barley, water, hops, and yeast.  The hops gives beer the bitterness quality. Most beer makers today couldn't imagine calling anything a beer without hops. However, traditionally in beer making hops dominance has only been in the last three hundred years and many people used a variety of different medicinal herbs if they wanted a medicinal effect or used strongly hallucinogenic herbs. The rise of hops as the dominant bitter herb is story of power and money and drugs. The Catholics had a monopoly on many bitter plants used in brewing. Many people were very sexually active from beers with a strongly aphrodiasic effect. So because of politics, money and drugs, the protestant governments took care them all by fixing the recipe.
 
 The law was followed because the consequences were harsh. In Scotland the law that is still in place caries a fine of three years jail time.

Hops is a plant that gives the beer a bitter taste and this is the taste of medicine. Hops themselves have sedative effects, and estrogenic effects. It is an an-aphrodisiac. Drinking too much will acumulate weight and breast tissue. There is a condition known  in England known as Brewers Droop for beer brewers exposed to much of it. You can imagine what there problem was.

I'll be playing with different medicinal drinks this spring, including some beer making. Ginger is highly medicinal and easy to access so I've started with ginger beer. This gallon batch will be ready to drink in three weeks.

Day 2