Spruce Beer Homebrew Recipe (made with spruce tips) (2024)

FAQs

How much spruce tips to add to beer? ›

So if you were brewing a porter or a stout it would probably be recommended to go with 2lbs or so. For a lighter beer 1lb should be fine. The young spruce tips that we harvest are not harsh, piney or resiny.

Fermented Spruce Tip Syrup

To make your syrup ferment, add ½ cup (4 oz) water to the basic proportions below, or just enough water so that the spruce tips are just barely covered with liquid from the get-go. Anywhere from ⅓ to ½ cup of water will do the trick.

Today Sitka spruce, native to the northwest coast of North America, tends to be favored, although other species of spruce have also been used. Lighter, more citrus-like flavors are produced by using the bright green fresh spring growth before the new needles and twigs harden and become woody.

Lots of piney, resinous notes, which many craft beer fans have come to expect from New World hops. As one online rater put it in a review of Ballast Point's Spruce Tip Sculpin: “Like regular Sculpin, but more dank.”

While all spruce tips are edible, I find blue spruce to be the most intense flavor. Spruce tips can be enjoyed raw, cooked into any dish and used as you might rosemary because their flavor profile is similar. I think that this flavor would pair well with white gamey meat and chicken.

Spruce tips have a range of flavors depending on their stage of maturity: herbal, fruity, citrus, resinous. They play well with both sweet and savory dishes. All spruce varieties (from the pine or Pinaceae family) are edible.

Bring two cups of water and two cups of sugar to a boil in a medium saucepan. Once sugar water is boiling, add the spruce tips. Stir and simmer for a few minutes. You'll see the color of the tips almost immediately change from a bright green to a much duller yellow-green color.

Water Your Finished Spruce Tip Pot

Place your pot where you want it and water to moisten the soil until it freezes. Fresh evergreens will continue to take up water like a fresh Christmas tree. Watering your pot will keep it fresh all season.

It was a joy to drink. It also was 7.5% alcohol content, so unwise to drink too many… I had never heard of Spruce Beer previously and was amazed to find it has a rich local history. When the British garrison was stationed in Halifax, each soldier had a ration of 2 quarts per man per day.

A lot of them had scurvy and they learned from the First Nations that the spruce was high in vitamin C.” This benefit as an anti-scorbutic was famously exploited by Captain Cook, who gave spruce beer to his crews. The difficulty in sourcing barley and hops in colonial America lead to spruce tips being commonly used.

Who makes a spruce tip beer? ›

Enjoy a fresh glass of our signature brew, Skagway Brewing Company's Spruce Tip Blonde Ale. The sweet citrus flavor and smooth finish are created using hydroelectric power to combine the flavors of Skagway's crystal-clear untreated water with hand-picked locally sourced spruce tips.

This hearty ale is a showcase for a traditional yet seldom used brewing ingredient: spruce tips. Harvested at their tender, ripe, bright green peak in Downer State Forest, Vermont, these spruce tips impart citrus, pine, spice, herbal and earthy notes.

If the twig carries its needles singly, it's a good bet you've got a fir or a spruce. Pull off a needle, and roll it between your fingers. If it feels flat and doesn't roll easily, it's a fir. If the needle has four sides and, thus, rolls easily between your fingers, it's a spruce.

Suggested use rates are 0.01% to 0.02% (w/v) of terpenes to beer.

So now, you know you need 0.5 mL of flavoring per ounce (113 mL) of beer left. If you had 5 gallons (19 L) remaining (640 oz./19,000 mL), you'd need 320 mL (10.8 fl. oz.)