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Deep Dives: Hops

Beer didn't always taste like this — for most of its history, it didn't have hops in it at all. This episode traces how a wild, untaxed weed toppled a centuries-old church-and-crown monopoly on beer flavoring, and debunks two of the most widely repeated legends in brewing history along the way: tha…
In 1602, an English explorer sailed home with a valuable cargo of sassafras root — and Sir Walter Raleigh seized the entire shipment using a royal trade patent, years before he ever set foot in North America himself. That's the real story behind an ingredient that went on to define an entire Americ…
In 1494, Columbus found a berry in Jamaica that looked enough like black pepper to fool him — and this time, the popular story is actually true. He named it wrong, the mistake stuck for five hundred years, and it's still baked into the Spanish word for allspice today. This episode traces what came …
In 1806, a twenty-two-year-old Boston merchant loaded a ship with a hundred and thirty tons of ice and sailed for the Caribbean, with no buyer waiting on the other end and a local newspaper already mocking him before he'd even left the dock. Frederic Tudor lost almost everything on that first voyag…
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