Hopped Beer Becomes a Major Hanseatic Trade Product

During the fourteenth century, beer became an important commodity in the commercial networks linking towns around the North Sea and Baltic. Hanseatic brewing centers including Hamburg, Wismar, Rostock, and Gdańsk produced beer for export, while merchants transported it to Scandinavia, the Low Countries, England, and other northern European markets. Hamburg developed an especially large export-brewing industry and became one of the leading beer-producing cities of the Hanseatic world. Hops helped make this expansion possible. Compared with many beers flavored with mixtures of herbs, hopped beer generally kept better during storage and transport, making it particularly suitable for long-distance trade. The success of Hanseatic export brewing therefore contributed to the wider spread of hopped beer across northern Europe, although the transition occurred gradually and unhopped or differently flavored beers continued to coexist with it.