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

FAQs

How do you use spruce tips in beer? ›

Fresh spruce tips can be infused in boiling water or wort without the fear of sharp flavors. Alaskan homebrewer Pete Devaris recommends boiling the fresh spruce tips in the wort for one hour.

COMMERCIAL BREWERIES - For commercial breweries we are seeing most people use 1-2lbs per BBL of spruce depending on the beer style for subtle flavor (juniper and other ingredients will have different dosage amounts.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

What is the best spruce for spruce tips? ›

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.

They are full of vitamin C for immune system strengthening, vitamin A for healthy organ function, magnesium and potassium, and have always been used by indigenous tribes for coughs, colds and sore throats.

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.

“If only the heartwood was used for construction, pine would be better than spruce owing to its durability, as spruce has no heartwood. But because heartwood, as the name implies, is only in the centre of the log, pine and spruce are equally good. There is no difference in their rate of growth either.

"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.

Add dried stems purchased or from your garden for a fall look: Dried Hydrangea blooms,Dogwood, gourds, mini pumpkins, ornamental corn. Add colorful berry stems or accents of your choosing for a holiday look. Spruce tops are not actively growing, so they do not need to be watered.