A revived medieval Dutch ale defined by its grain bill: at least 45 percent oat malt and at least 20 percent wheat malt, with pale malt making up the rest. Typically 4.7–7.9% ABV, gold to copper, with a grainy, bready character distinct from any modern ale. Hopping is light and bitterness moderate, leaving the layered cereal flavor of oats and wheat at the center of the beer.
In the glass
Origin
Kuit — also spelled kuyt or koyt — was a hopped ale that dominated brewing in the Low Countries for roughly a century and a half in the late medieval and early modern period, with its heyday running through the 1400s and into the 1500s. Its identity rested on a grist heavy in oats and wheat alongside barley malt, a composition unusual to modern palates but typical of the grains available to Dutch brewers of the era. Kuit was a hopped beer from the start: by the time it emerged, hopped beer had already displaced the older gruit ales of the Low Countries, and the hopped kuit became a mainstay of Dutch commercial brewing before later styles displaced it in turn.
The style was effectively extinct for centuries until modern Dutch brewers took an interest in reconstructing it. The Haarlem brewery Jopen produces a Koyt reconstructed from a 1407 Haarlem brewing ordinance — rediscovered in the city archives by the Stichting Haarlems Biergenootschap, founded in 1992 — helping return the name to commercial shelves. Craft brewers elsewhere in Europe and in North America have since released their own interpretations.
Notes
What makes a kuit unmistakable is the grain rather than the hops or yeast: a beer that is roughly half oat malt, with a sizable wheat fraction on top, tastes and feels different from anything in the modern catalog — grainy, bready, and soft. Some modern revivals split the difference with history by flavoring a kuit-style grist with gruit herbs, producing a hybrid that nods to both the herbal and the hopped eras of the style. Brewing a true kuit is demanding because high proportions of oat and wheat malt make for a sticky, hard-to-lauter mash, which is part of why authentic examples remain uncommon.
Defining examples
Jopen Koyt (Haarlem)·Various American and European craft revivals