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Hops are the flowers (also called seed cones or strobiles) of the hop plant ''Humulus lupulus.'' They are used primarily as a flavoring and stability agent in beer, to which they impart a bitter, tangy flavor, though they are also used for various purposes in other beverages and herbal medicine. In the Middle Ages, beers tended to be of a very low alcohol content (small beer). In Europe, many villages had one or more small breweries with a barley field and a hop garden in close vicinity. Early documents include mention of a hop garden in the will of Charlemagne's father, Pepin III.〔 〕〔 〕 However, the first documented use of hops in beer is from the 9th century, though Hildegard of Bingen, 300 years later, is often cited as the earliest documented source. Before this period, brewers used "gruit", composed of a wide variety of bitter herbs and flowers, including dandelion, burdock root, marigold, horehound (the old German name for horehound, ''Berghopfen'', means "mountain hops"), ground ivy, and heather.〔(【引用サイトリンク】title=Understanding Beer - A Broad Overview of Brewing, Tasting and Analyzing Beer - October 12th, 2006, Beer & Brewing, The Brewing Process )〕 Hops are used extensively in brewing for their antibacterial effect that favors the activity of brewer's yeast over less desirable microorganisms and for many purported benefits, including balancing the sweetness of the malt with bitterness, contributing a variety of desirable flavors and aromas. Historically, traditional herb combinations for beers were believed to have been abandoned when beers made with hops were noticed to be less prone to spoilage. The hop plant is a vigorous, climbing, herbaceous perennial, usually trained to grow up strings in a field called a hopfield, hop garden (nomenclature in the South of England), or hop yard (in the West Country and U.S.) when grown commercially. Many different varieties of hops are grown by farmers around the world, with different types being used for particular styles of beer. ==History== The first documented hop cultivation was in 736, in the Hallertau region of present-day Germany, although the first mention of the use of hops in brewing in that country was 1079.〔 〕 However in a will of Pepin the Short, the father of Charlemagne, 768 hop gardens were left to the Cloister of Saint-Denis. Not until the 13th century did hops begin to start threatening the use of gruit for flavoring. Gruit was used when taxes were levied by the nobility on hops. Whichever was taxed made the brewer then quickly switch to the other. In Britain, hopped beer was first imported from Holland around 1400, yet hops were condemned as late as 1519 as a "wicked and pernicious weed". In 1471, Norwich, England, banned use of the plant in the brewing of ale ("beer" was the name for fermented malt liquors bittered with hops; only in recent times are the words often used as synonyms). Hops used in England were imported from France, Holland and Germany with import duty paid for those; it was not until 1524 that hops were first grown in the southeast of England (Kent) when they were introduced as an agricultural crop by Dutch farmers. Therefore, in the hop industry there are many words which originally were Dutch words (see oast house). Hops were then grown as far north as Aberdeen, near breweries for infrastructure convenience. It was another century before hop cultivation began in the present-day United States, in 1629 by English and Dutch farmers.〔 〕 Before national alcohol prohibition, cultivation was mainly centered around New York, California, Oregon, and Washington. Problems with powdery mildew and downy mildew devastated New York's production by the 1920s, and California only produces hops on a small scale. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Hops」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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