What Did The Vikings Drink - History Of Viking Beer

Vikings’ everyday drink was ale brewed at home from barley, most likely flavored with sweet gale rather than hops. Medieval Norse texts say the mistress of the household usually brewed it. How strong it was cannot be measured today. Honey mead and imported wine were costly and kept for feasts and the wealthy.

Vikings were people accompanied by the image of bloodthirsty warriors who dominated Europe and beyond in the Middle Ages. However, although the Vikings did not hesitate to shed the blood of their enemies during countless wars, it was not the only thing these fearless warriors craved.

When asked if the Vikings knew about alcohol, the answer is probably known to everyone. Yes, the Vikings enjoyed drinking alcoholic drinks. If you think about it a little better, in order to survive in the cold and dark north, the Vikings HAD to consume something sweet and alcoholic that would lift their mood and warm their blood in the cold months.

So, what did the Vikings actually drink?

Did the Vikings Drink Wine and Beer?

Alcoholic drinks are an indispensable part of the picture most of us have of the Vikings nowadays.

According to archaeological findings, Norse men had various drinks at their disposal. Beer was by far the most common, but the Vikings knew wine as well. Most of it came from the Rhineland. At Hedeby, archaeologists found barrels of fir wood from the Upper Rhine, made for the wine trade and later reused to line wells, and fine pottery jugs from the Rhineland and northern France, known as Tating ware, turn up at trading towns such as Ribe and in rich women’s graves.

Wine was even part of the price of peace. In 866 the Frankish king Charles the Bald agreed to pay the Northmen on the Seine 4,000 pounds of silver, and the Annals of St-Bertin record that the levy was raised “in silver and in wine”. Two years earlier, Lothar II had paid off the Viking Rodulf partly in flour, livestock, wine and cider.

Did the Danes make wine of their own? The evidence is two charred grape pips from the royal halls at Lake Tissø on Zealand, one from the late Iron Age and one from the Viking Age, the oldest grape seeds yet found in Denmark. A strontium test suggests one of them could have grown locally, but the excavators (Henriksen, Holst and Frei, 2017) think the vines may have been brought from the south and grown locally, but they find no direct evidence of wine-making in Scandinavia and cannot tell whether the grapes were eaten or pressed. What they do conclude is that grapes, and probably wine, were consumed by the elite at Tissø.

Either way, wine was a luxury for wealthy households, not an everyday drink.

Most of the Vikings mostly drank a weaker alcoholic beer called "ale." Drinking ale every day was a Viking lifestyle and an integral part of Viking culture. This drink was especially important during sea voyages because sometimes, the Vikings spent several months on the high seas.

You will often read that people drank ale because the water was unsafe. Scholars now reject that idea. Medieval Europeans did drink water, even if it was thought a humble drink, as the classicist Max Nelson argues in “Beer: Necessity or Luxury?” (2011), and wells are a standard find on Viking-Age sites, from Hedeby and Trelleborg to the settlement at Lindholm Høje in northern Jutland (Marseen, Kuml 1956). Ale mattered for other reasons. It turned grain into a drink full of calories, which the Vikings needed for their heavy daily work, and no feast was complete without it.

In addition to beers, Vikings also drank mead made from honey. However, as honey was expensive, this sweet drink was drunk only on special occasions. Therefore, we can conclude that beer was still the main beverage for the Viking people.

However, if you are looking for an answer to the question: "What kind of beer did the Vikings drink?" then you will be surprised by some of the answers you'll get.

Viking Mead: The Drink of the Gods

Beer kept the Vikings going day to day, but mead is the drink that made it into their myths. So what is mead, exactly? Mead is made by fermenting honey with water, which places it closer to a honey wine than to any beer. Unlike ale, no grain is involved at all. The honey provides the sugar, the yeast does the rest, and the result is sweeter and usually stronger than everyday ale.

That difference in ingredients explains the difference in status. Grain grew across Scandinavia, but honey did not come easily in the north. Summers were short, wild bees were scarce, and imported honey cost dearly. So while ale filled the cups at every table, Nordic mead was poured at feasts, weddings, and in the halls of chieftains and kings. Serving mead told your guests something about your wealth before anyone said a word.

Did Vikings Drink Mead in Their Myths Too?

The gods certainly did, and that is where mead earned its reputation. According to Snorri's Skáldskaparmál, the dwarfs brewed the famous Mead of Poetry from honey and the blood of Kvasir, the wisest of beings. Odin later won it for the gods, and whoever drank it became a poet or a scholar. In Grímnismál (stanza 25), the goat Heiðrún stands on the roof of Valhalla and fills a vat with bright mead, and Snorri adds in Gylfaginning that it flows from her udders, enough to keep the cups of the einherjar, Odin's fallen warriors, full every single day. When your paradise runs on mead, it is fair to call it the drink of the gods.

As for a true Viking mead recipe, none survives. What we can say from residue finds and later Norse sources is simple: honey, water, and wild yeast, sometimes with berries or herbs added. Anything more detailed than that is modern guesswork, and honest meaderies will tell you so.

And meaderies there are. Craft mead has quietly boomed over the past decade, and plenty of small producers now sell bottles labeled as Viking mead. Think of these as modern drinks inspired by the north, not reconstructions. That said, sipping one from a horn or from one of our carved Viking mead mugs is probably the closest most of us will get to a night in Valhalla.

What Percentage of Alcohol Did Beer Have (% abv)?

Many of the ingredients used in brewing at the time were gathered wild, such as berries and aromatic herbs.

As for the types of beer that the Vikings once produced, there were probably many different types. The kind of Viking beer depended on the region in which the beer was made and the plants used in the brewing process.

Ale cannot ferment without yeast, and the Norse knew yeast as an ingredient in its own right. Old Norse had two words for it, jǫstr and dregg, and a skaldic kenning calls ale the “flood of yeast” (jastar flœðr), as the glossary to Anthony Faulkes’ Viking Society edition of Skáldskaparmál records. Yeast turns sugar into alcohol and carbon dioxide. No yeast has yet been identified at a Viking-Age site, though. Norway’s farmhouse kveik yeasts are often sold as “Viking yeast”, but the genetic study by Preiss and colleagues (2018) notes that the oldest known logs for storing kveik date to at least 1621, and nothing yet links kveik to the Viking Age.

Old Norse also had more than one word for the drink. Öl and mungát both meant ale, and mungát was used for the stronger brews. Bjórr, a cousin of English “beer” (Old English bēor), seems to have meant something else. In a 1975 study in Leeds Studies in English, Christine Fell argued that Old English bēor was a drink made from honey and fruit juice, not beer at all, and that for Anglo-Saxons and Vikings alike bēor or bjórr may have been the strongest drink available. The Eddic poem Alvíssmál (stanza 34) plays on the same words: ale is called öl among men and bjórr among the gods.

So how strong was it? Nobody knows. No Viking brewing recipe survives, and residues on old vessels can show what went into a drink but not how much alcohol it held. The figures of 2% to 13% abv repeated online are guesses, not measurements. Strength depended on how much malt went into each brew, so the ale poured at a wedding or a funeral feast may well have been stronger than the household’s everyday drink. As for the popular claim that weak ale was given to children, there is no Viking-Age evidence either way.

Who Brewed Viking Ale?

Mostly women, as far as the evidence goes, but that evidence is not archaeological. Brewing needs no special tools that end up in a grave, so excavations cannot tell us who did it. What we have are medieval Icelandic and Norwegian texts, written down in the 13th and 14th centuries, 150 to 300 years after the Viking Age. They usually put the húsfreyja, the mistress of the household, in charge of the ale. In Hálfs saga ok Hálfsrekka (ch. 1), Queen Signý and Geirhildr compete over a brew. Signý calls on Freyja and Geirhildr on Höttr, who is Odin in disguise, and he wins the contest for her by giving his spittle as yeast.

The law codes are less clear-cut than popular articles suggest. The Older Gulathing Law of western Norway makes brewing ale, blessed “to Christ and St Mary for good harvest and peace”, a religious duty, and names both the farmer and his wife (bóandi ok húsfreyja) in it (ch. 6 to 7). We have found no law code that makes brewing equipment a woman’s legal property, though the claim circulates widely online without a source. And men brewed too. As Ann Sheffield shows in “Men Who Brew” (Scandinavian Studies, 2023), the two brewers described most fully in Old Norse literature are both male: the Icelander Ölkofri (Ale-Hood) and the sea giant Ægir, who brews ale for the gods in Hymiskviða and Lokasenna.

What Did Viking Ale Taste Like?

Just as the exact strength of the beer produced by the Vikings is unknown, we cannot say with certainty what the flavor of ale was like.

The Vikings did not keep notes of how they made this popular beer (unfortunately).

For that reason, although there are numerous ideas about how beer was brewed in Scandinavia at that time, the exact recipe and equipment for beer making in the early Middle Ages have not yet been discovered.

We know the basic steps: grain was malted, mashed in hot water, and the sweet liquid left to ferment. Done on a farm with wooden vessels, it was a long way from how a brewery works today.

It's also known that the Vikings used grain, water, yeast, and aromatic plants for beer production. The main plant, though, was probably not hops. The best-attested beer herb of Viking-Age Scandinavia is sweet gale, a wild shrub of bogs and heaths also called bog myrtle, and hops only took over later in the Middle Ages (more on both below). The taste of beer depended on many factors that the Vikings could not influence.

So, for example, different grains contain different sugar content. The conditions in which grains and herbs grow vary from harvest to harvest, which greatly influenced the taste of the beer produced.

Beer was most often brewed from barley in the Viking Age. Although, in addition to barley, oats or rye grains could also be used, depending on the presence of these cereals in the area where the beer was brewed.

We must also mention bere, a six-row barley still grown on Orkney and the Western Isles of Scotland. It is the oldest barley variety still cultivated in Britain, and tradition says the Norse brought it there in the 8th century. A genetic study by Drosou and colleagues (2022) found that bere is closely related to Scandinavian barleys, which partly fits that story, but the two may share an ancestor going back to the Bronze Age, and Orkney farmers had been growing barley since the Neolithic. Bere was long used for malting, and it has gone into beers from Valhalla Brewery on Shetland and Swannay Brewery on Orkney.

Sweet Gale, Not Hops: The Herb in Viking Ale

Sweet gale (Myrica gale), known as bog myrtle in Britain and pors in Danish, is a shrub about a meter tall with aromatic, resinous leaves and catkins. It grows wild on wet heath and bog across much of the Viking homelands, and archaeobotanists treat it as the original beer herb of northern Europe. Its use is ancient: the birch-bark bucket buried with the Bronze Age Egtved girl in Denmark held the residue of a drink made with wheat, cowberries or cranberries, honey and bog myrtle.

The Viking-Age finds follow on from that. In Denmark, sweet gale remains come from 8th-century Ribe, from a well at Trabjerg dated to around 900, from Aggersborg, and from Viborg (c. 1025 to 1125), as listed by Karg and Günther (2002). Hops are there too, but thinner on the ground. Hop remains are known from early 8th-century Ribe, 9th-century Birka, 9th- to 10th-century Hedeby and early 11th-century Viborg (Susan Verberg, Brewery History, 2020), and a review of 14 Viking-Age excavations in southern Scandinavia found hop at only two of the sites (Sloth, Hansen and Karg 2012). Those authors think hopped beer may have been brewed earlier than once assumed. Still, a few cone fragments on a site do not tell us how the plant was used, while sweet gale turns up again and again.

In short, a Viking ale was far more likely to taste of sweet gale than of hops. Karl-Ernst Behre's review of beer additives in Europe, as summarized by Verberg, concludes that until the 13th century sweet gale was the main additive wherever it grew wild, and hops the main one beyond that range. Hops pushed it aside only after that, once hopped beer proved that it kept and traveled better.

What Is Gruit?

Gruit (Dutch gruit, German Grut) is the medieval name for the herb mixture used to flavor unhopped beer in the Low Countries and northern Germany. Making and selling it was a privilege, and from the 13th century city gruit houses appear in town accounts buying grain, sweet gale, laurel berries and other herbs to produce it, as Verberg sets out. The word and the system are continental, first recorded in the Low Countries in the late 10th century (an imperial grant of 999 calls it grutt), so no Viking at home in Scandinavia would have called their ale a gruit. The core herb, however, is the same sweet gale found at Ribe. Today "gruit ale" is the name brewers use for any beer flavored with herbs instead of hops, and it is probably the closest modern match to what was poured in a Viking hall.

What is the Oldest Known Beer?

It is believed that beer was one of the first drinks made and that people produced it much earlier than we can imagine.

In 2018 a team led by Li Liu reported residues in stone mortars at Raqefet Cave in Israel, about 13,000 years old, which they read as the earliest archaeological evidence for cereal-based beer brewing. The brewers were Natufians, semi-sedentary foragers who had not yet begun to farm. The reading is debated, and not every archaeologist accepts it.

Some archaeologists have gone further and argued that the wish to brew beer helped drive the start of cereal farming, an idea first debated at a 1953 symposium and revived by Solomon Katz and Mary Voigt in 1986. This “beer before bread” theory is still debated.

What Did the Vikings Drink Beer From?

Although hand-made beer mugs existed in the Viking Age, we still much prefer the depiction of a Viking consuming his drink from an animal horn. If you think alike, let's see how you can turn a horn into a beer mug or tumbler.

Instructions for making drinking horns:

1. Immerse the cleaned horn in boiling water and leave it in the water for half an hour. This way, you will get rid of the foul smell of the horn and rid it of bacteria.
2. Dissolve 100% pure beeswax. You can do this by putting the wax in a bowl of hot water.
3. Pour the wax into the horn until you cover the inside of the horn in a thick layer.
4. You can polish and edit the outside of the horn as desired.
5. Allow the horn to dry for at least 24 hours.
6. Make a stand on which you can place the horn while drinking your drink.
7. Pour the beer into the horn and enjoy like a real Viking.

Conclusion

Drinking beer in Viking culture was more than just relaxing after a hard day's work or a hard fight. It also tied the living to the dead. Describing a sacrificial feast in Hákonar saga góða, Snorri Sturluson says that people drank toasts to the gods and also to their distinguished dead kinsmen, and these toasts were called minni.

Therefore, it would be absolutely wrong to look at the Vikings solely as drunk and cruel savages. On the contrary, brewing beer in the conditions in which the Vikings lived is proof of the sophistication of the Viking people. If nothing else, the cultivation of domesticated cereals for brewing beer was really proof of Vikings' ingenuity and advanced social structure.

Until our next meeting,

Skål!

Keep exploring: Read more about daily life in the Viking Age, what Vikings drank out of, and Viking Yule traditions, or shop our Viking jewelry collection.

Viking Beer FAQ

Did the Vikings really drink beer?

Yes. Ale brewed from barley was the everyday drink of Viking-Age Scandinavia. People drank water too; ale mattered because it turned grain into calories and because no feast was complete without it.

How strong was Viking beer?

Nobody knows. No Viking brewing recipe survives and archaeological residues cannot reveal alcohol content, so popular figures such as 2% or 13% abv are guesses. Old Norse did have a separate word, mungát, for the stronger brews.

Did Vikings use hops in their beer?

Possibly, but hops were not their main beer herb. Hop remains turn up at 8th-century Ribe and at Viking-Age Birka, Hedeby and Viborg, yet sweet gale (bog myrtle) is the better-attested additive in Viking-Age Scandinavia. Hops only replaced it in the Middle Ages, from roughly the 13th century.

Did Vikings drink out of horns?

Drinking horns are the popular image and were genuinely used, but hand-carved wooden mugs existed alongside them in the Viking Age too.

Who brewed the beer in Viking society?

Mostly women, according to medieval Icelandic and Norwegian texts, which usually put the mistress of the household in charge of the ale. Archaeology cannot show who brewed, and the same texts name male brewers too, such as the sea giant Ægir, who brews for the gods.

Did the Vikings drink mead?

Yes. Mead, made by fermenting honey with water, was drunk in Viking-Age Scandinavia. Because honey was scarce and expensive in the north, it was a prestige drink saved for feasts, weddings, and the halls of the wealthy, while everyday drinking was covered by grain-brewed ale. Norse myth even fills Valhalla with mead from the goat Heiðrún.

What is the difference between mead and Viking ale?

The base ingredient. Ale is brewed from grain such as barley, while mead is fermented from honey and water, which makes it technically closer to a honey wine. Ale was the cheap everyday drink, while mead was sweeter, probably stronger, and reserved for special occasions like feasts and weddings.