Tree Beer Brewing With Wafer Ash

Throughout brewing history, fermented beverages have used native ingredients. Plentiful and readily available, honey, dates, corn, as well as various herbs and spices often appeared in the recipes of historic or ancient beers. In much of Northern Europe, grog, Gruit, mead, and Braggot were commonplace before the German Reinheitsgebot, or purity law, of 1516 was instituted specifying that beer should contain nothing more than barley, yeast, hops, and water. 

- Jeremy Banas

Once European settlers began arriving in North America, they lost ready access to malted barley and hops. Not ones to do without fermented beverages, these resourceful colonists substituted fruits and vegetables and other local ingredients, like spruce tips, to make their beer.

By the 1800s, standard brewing ingredients were widely available in the United States, yet some parts of the country still lacked key raw materials. Sometimes necessity truly is the mother of invention. Enter the Ptelea Trifoliata, also known as the hop tree or wafer ash, a shrub or small tree found throughout the Eastern half of the US and Canada.

This perennial has four to five stems and a thin, small, greenish yellow wing-like fruit, which provides bittering characteristics in a beer. Historically, wafer ash had medicinal and homeopathic uses, though it was never formally made into a drug. The wafer ash’s antiperiodic and stomachic properties were used to help treat diseases such as dyspepsia and debility. Tonic made from the plant was able to soothe mucous membranes, promoting appetite in sick patients.