posted 10 years ago
This is something I discovered a couple of years ago, but I am amazed how few people know about this...
Hops is one of the most estrogenic plants/ingredients we know about. It was aslo used as a sedative (and against insomnia etc...) in Antiquity, before being used in beer. People in the last century working the hops fields in Germany complained of being tired, and would sometimes fall asleep during the job. Working girls would start menstruating much earlier, and many brewers in England handling the hops all day long, would suffer from something called "brewers droop", meaning... impotence... Estrogen is libido inhibiting, for both men and women...
The interesting thing is, beer wasn't always brewed with hops, before, in the early middle ages in Europe, we had something called "gruilt" or "gruit", and there were other herbs used together with the grains, and these herbs were slightly sexually stimulating and energising, among other- they did not sedate.
The protestant church and the politicians at the time created a law stating that all beer had to be brewed with hops, otherwise one would have been given a heavy fine... It all started in Germany, and soon the other states followed. A lot of people were against this! In the beginning in England even the rulers were against this practice, many complained that this substance was actually dangerous and made people "melancholic" (read=depressed), among other...
Why do heavy beer drinkers grow man breast and/or a soft body...? It's not a coincidence... There are herbal supplement for women who want to grow bigger breast, and the first ingredients is... hops... Even for women too much oestrogen is bad: risk of cysts in breasts and reproductive organs, weight problems, mind fog, lack of libido, adrenal disfunction...
Unhopped beers are rare unfortunately... Btw, people say we hops is used because it keeps the beer from going bad, but the truth is that there are other herbs that can do that job as well.
Here we have an ingredient imposed by the protestant church, that is a sedative and a libido downer... Not that fun in my opinion !