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

FAQs

How to use spruce tips in beer? ›

Make an infusion from the juniper branches, spruce tips or fir tips with enough water for the mash. Let the branches or tips infuse for 2–3 hours. Before mashing in, heat the infusion high enough to arrive at a mash temperature of 66–68°C (151–154°F). Keep the mash at this temperature for 45 minutes.

Spruce tips have a distinct taste — citrus with a hint of resin. You can snack on them fresh or or add them to salads. Dried spruce tips can be ground in a coffee grinder and make a great nutmeg like spice – check out the recipe for Moose Steak with Yukon Rub and for Northern Pumpkin Pie! They can also be used in teas.

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.

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.

This is an easy tip to remember: on pine trees, needles are attached and attached to the branches in clusters; on spruce trees, needles are attached individually. A longleaf pine – which you can tell is a pine because its needles are attached in bundles.

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.”

Bring the sugar and water to a boil in a lidded pot, stirring to make sure all the sugar is absorbed. When it hits a boil, turn off the heat. Stir in the spruce tips, cover the pot and leave to cool. The longer you steep the syrup, the stronger spruce flavor you'll get.

Spruce tips are generally clean, but you can remove their party hats and give them a quick rinse to remove any dust and debris. They will last a few months in a paper bag in the fridge, if you can't use what you just harvested.

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.

Sitka spruce: This is the most common spruce used in guitar soundboard construction. It is essentially the baseline of spruce tonewood, with much of the information mentioned above applying to it. Sitka spruce top guitars are great for aggressive and gentle playing styles alike.

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.

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.

Spruce tree needles are very short and attached individually. There are different types of spruce trees, and all spruce tips are edible. When identifying spruce trees for foraging, simply look for the bright green tips emerging from branches in high-spring.

Boil spruce tips in water for 15 minutes (approximately 4 oz of spruce in 3 cups of water) to make a wonderful essence that can be used in making bread or other baking recipes.

Use Like Hops

Then add fresh spruce tips only, to the end of the boil for aroma additions.

"Ancient Scandinavians and their Viking descendants brewed beer from young shoots of Norway spruce, drinking the beer for strength in battle, for fertility and to prevent scurvy on long sea voyages," according to the second edition of the Oxford Encyclopedia of Food and Drink in America.