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Hop Tea
Put the hops into a covered jug with boiling water, in the proportion of an ounce of hops to a pint of water. When cold, pour off the liquid and bottle for use. A quarter of a pint taken fasting is often found beneficial in attacks of indigestion. If double the quantity of hops is used, it will be an excellent tonic. Sufficient for a pint of the tea.
A cold-drawn hop infusion, made as a household bitter tonic rather than a beverage for pleasure. The proportions are strong by modern herbal-tea standards, and the method matters more than the timing.
- The proportionAn ounce of dried hops to a pint (imperial, about 570 ml) of boiling water is roughly 28 g of hop cones to just over half a litre — several times the strength of a normal cup of tea. The "double quantity" tonic version is 2 oz to the pint and will be aggressively bitter.
- What to buyUse whole dried hop cones sold for brewing or as a herbal tea rather than pellets, which disintegrate and are awkward to strain. Hops oxidise quickly; cones that smell cheesy rather than resinous and grassy are stale.
- The hinge: let it go coldThe instruction to pour off only "when cold" is the whole method: the infusion continues as the jug cools, and the lid keeps the aromatic oils in. The recipe gives no timing; simply leave it until fully cold, which for a covered jug will mean several hours or overnight.
- VesselA covered jug means any lidded heatproof pitcher; a French press or a teapot with the lid on does the same job and makes straining easier. Avoid unlined aluminium, which reacts with the acids.
- Keeping it"Bottle for use" assumed a cold larder and quick consumption. This is an unpreserved water infusion with no acid or sugar to protect it: refrigerate and use within two or three days.
- Yield and doseA pint gives four doses at the quarter-pint (about 140 ml) suggested. Taken "fasting" means on an empty stomach, first thing.
- A word on the claimsHops have a long-standing reputation as a mild sedative, and bitter infusions do stimulate saliva and gastric secretion, which is the basis of the digestive claim. Treat the recipe as a period drink rather than a remedy; hops are best avoided by anyone pregnant or taking sedatives.
Hops (Humulus lupulus) reached English cookery through brewing, where they are generally said to have arrived from the Low Countries in the fifteenth century as a preservative and bittering agent for beer, and from there passed into the domestic medicine chest. Bitter tonics of this kind — hop, gentian, wormwood, quassia — were a fixture of nineteenth-century household practice, taken before food on the theory that bitterness roused a sluggish stomach; the sedative reputation of hops is the same one behind the traditional hop-filled pillow.