Cologne's town council directed a knowledgeable woman to teach a brewer a gruit recipe, illustrating how herb mixtures for unhopped beer were specialised and sometimes secret. Gruit was gradually displaced by hops in much of Europe.

The recording of a closely guarded gruit recipe in Cologne preserves the world of alewives, urban regulation, and domestic life behind late medieval comic writing. Poets like Geoffrey Chaucer and later Elizabethan writers drew on these everyday themes, infusing their works with humor and social commentary.