Hops. Barley. Yeast. Water. Nearly every beer is brewed with those four ingredients and sometimes a few other relatively common ones.
That wasn’t always the case. In ancient times, brewers used herbs and plants they could find in the lands that surrounded them to balance out the sweet malt and to act as a preservative. They used ingredients such as catnip, galangal root, mandrake, mistletoe, mugwort, and spruce tips.
Those ingredients lost favor, though, when brewers discovered the magic of hops. Hops preserved beer far longer than the likes of sweet gale or chickweed, and hops provided flavors ranging from earthy and piney to plum and grass and even citrusy fruits, providing a balance to the malt. Today, hoppy beers are still the most popular beers in the craft-beer world, and nearly every craft brewer brews at least one version of an IPA.