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

FAQs

How do you use spruce tips in beer? ›

We normally add the spruce to the last 15 min of the boil (or less). The aromatic quality of the spruce is most present with this process. ANOTHER NOTE - Because of the different sensitivities to spruce tips, if this is your first time around using them go on your gut.

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.

Getting Started With Spruce Tips

A good place to start is a simple pale ale recipe with 2 to 4 ounces of spruce tips added between 15 minutes, and flame out. From this first batch, you can shrink or expand the quantities as your taste buds dictate.

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.”

They can also be used in teas. Candied spruce tips make a delicious snack and they store well in the fridge in a mason jar. The remaining birch syrup infused with spruce tips makes a wonderful coniferous-deciduous syrup blend that can then be used to make Spruce Tip Spritzers.

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 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.

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.

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.

Normal ale fermentation temperatures range from 68 to 72 °F (20 to 22 °C) and lager fermentation temperatures from 45 to 55 °F (7 to 13 °C). Also keep in mind that the heat generated by an active fermentation can warm a typical 5-gallon (19-L) batch of beer by 10 to 15 degrees Fahrenheit (5.5 to 8.3 degrees Celsius).

Are Sitka spruce tips edible? ›

The tips of all pine trees are edible, but be sure not to confuse them with the poisonous yew tree. I tend to go for Norway spruce or Sitka spruce just because it's plentiful here.

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 or other evergreens have sometimes been used as a flavoring ingredient in beer, such as Alba Scots Pine Ale, the Alaskan Brewing Company's Winter Ale, Beau's Brewery's Spruce Moose Pale Ale, and Yards Brewing Company's Poor Richard's Tavern Spruce.