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The origins of the use of hops as a constituent ingredient
in brewing is an intriguing literary and linguistic subject.
E. L. Davis, and others before him, have drawn attention
to the importance given to hops in the folklore of Finland
and the Caucasus region and believed to reflect a cultural
heritage of great antiquity. They thus inferred that hops
were used as an ingredient for beer in the northeast and
east of Europe long before this practice was introduced in
western Europe.[582] In a more recent study, Arnald Steiger
traced the origin of the custom even further eastward.
The earliest word forms for hops (best reflected in Old
Turkish qumlaq), Steiger contends are found in a variety of
Ural-Altaic languages of great antiquity. From there the
term migrated west into the orbit of the Slavic languages
(Old Slavic chǔmelǐ and through the latter into the North
Germanic language groups (Old West Nordic humili) which
transmitted it to the Salian and Ripuarian Franks (Middle
Latin humelo . . . leading to Modern French houblon). This
evidence, Steiger argues, suggests that the practice of
hopping beer originated in Central Asia and was transmitted
from there to Northern and Western Europe by the
Slavs along the linguistic channels indicated by the
migration of the word for hops.[583]

The Greeks knew the plant only in its uncultivated state
(and under a different name), but the Romans grew it in
their vegetable gardens and used it as a flavoring agent for
salads.[584]

[582]

E. L. Davis, 1956, unpublished thesis, Dept. of Botany, Washington
University. Numerous references to the use of hops in brewing beer are
found in the Finnish epic poem Kalevala, a typical example of which, as
rendered in the prose edition by Francis Peabody Magoun, Jr., 1963, 137,
reads as follows:

"Then the mistress of North Farm, when she heard about the origin of
beer, got a big tub of water, a new wooden tub half full, with barley
enough in it and a lot of hop pods. She began to boil the beer, to prepare
the strong liquor in the new wooden cask, in the birchwood keg."

The Kalevala, song 20, lines 421-26

(The Finnish word for "hops" used in the Kalevala is humala).

On the early west European history of hop cultivation, its diffusion
from the territory of the Franks to the territory of the Bajuvarians and
other Germanic tribes, see Victor Hehn, 1874, 411ff (or any of the many
later editions of this important work). The subject is also discussed in
Heyne, II, 1901, 72, and 341. To the kindness of Lynn White I owe the
knowledge of the following more recent literature: Steiger, 1954 (a well-documented
linguistic study); Ditmond, 1954 (good, but exasperating
reading since its author, obviously well-informed, takes as much pain in
hiding the sources of his learning as he must have taken in acquiring it);
Darling, 1961 (deals primarily with conditions in England, but has a good
bibliographical section); Macdonagh, 1964 (stresses the antibiotic effects
of hops permitting preservation and transportation of beer); Birch 1965
(useless).

[583]

Steiger, op. cit.

[584]

Pliny, Hist. Nat., book XXI, chap. 50; ed. cit., VI, 1951, 222-23.