Spruce beer

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spring growth on a spruce tree
spring growth on a spruce tree

Spruce beer is a beverage flavored with the buds, needles, or essence of spruce trees. Spruce has been a traditional flavoring ingredient throughout the upper latitudes of the Northern Hemisphere where it is found, often substituting for ingredients otherwise not available, such as hops. Spruce beer can refer to either alcoholic or non-alcoholic beverages.

A number of flavors are associated with spruce-flavored beverages, ranging from floral, citrusy, and fruity to cola-like flavors to resinous and piney. This diversity in flavor likely comes from the choice of spruce species, the season in which the needles are harvested, and the manner of preparation.

The fresh shoots of many spruces and pines are a natural source of vitamin C.[1] Captain Cook had both malt and sugar-based spruce beer made during his sea voyages in order to prevent scurvy in his crew[2].

Contents

[edit] Types

[edit] Malt beverages

Spruce may be used to flavor traditional beer made from malted barley and water fermented with yeast. This flavoring can be added with spruce essence or by including spruce twigs or needles with the wort during the boiling stage of brewing, either in addition to or as a substitute for hops. See also gruit and sahti.

[edit] Fermented sugar beverages

Alcoholic spruce beer may also be made from sugar and flavoring from the spruce tree. Leaves, small branches, or extracted essence of spruce are boiled with sugar and fermented with yeast. Two different sources of sugar may be used, either molasses or white refined sugar. Some consider the latter to be better, but other aficionados prefer the complexity that molasses gives to the former.

[edit] Soda

In the Canadian province of Quebec, spruce beer is an artificially flavoured non-alcoholic carbonated soft drink. Despite its name, its flavour bears little resemblance to beer, and instead smells and tastes of more of evergreens. It is widely available in supermarkets, while alcoholic spruce beer is available only in specialty shops and some old time taverns. In Quebec it is known in French as bière d'épinette.[citation needed]

[edit] Regional varieties

[edit] Europe

Norway Spruce is used for making spruce beer widely in northern Europe [3]. In Scandinavia it is used to flavor fermented ales in the absence of hops.

[edit] North America

Alcoholic spruce beer was common in the colonial United States[citation needed], and eastern Canada. An American recipe[4] from 1796 states:

Take four ounces of hops, let them boil half an hour in one gallon of water, strain the hop water then add sixteen gallons of warm water, two gallons of molasses, eight ounces of essence of spruce, dissolved in one quart of water, put it in a clean cask, then shake it well together, add half a pint of emptins, then let it stand and work one week, if very warm weather less time will do, when it is drawn off to bottle, add one spoonful of molasses to every bottle.

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. Sitka spruce trees on the north-central Oregon Coast develop spring growth in early to mid May.

[edit] Commercial examples

[edit] External links

[edit] References

  1. ^ Tree Book - Sitka spruce Accessed 07/29/2006
  2. ^ Stubbs, B.J., "Captain Cook's beer: the antiscorbutic use of malt and beer in late 18th century sea voyages", Asia Pacific Journal of Clinical Nutrition, 2003, v. 12, p. 129-137.
  3. ^ Dallimore, W. D., & Jackson, A. B. (1966). A Handbook of Coniferae and Ginkgoaceae. Edward Arnold, London.
  4. ^ Simmons, Amelia (1796). American Cookery, Hudson & Goodwin, Hartford, Connecticut. (reproduced by Project Gutenberg)
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