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Drink

Spruce Beer

A fermented beverage made from boiling water, molasses, spruce extract, and yeast.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Spruce Beer

Spruce Beer

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the wort

  1. Add molasses and extract of spruce to boiling water.

  2. Allow the mixture to cool until lukewarm.

Ferment

  1. Stir in the yeast and let it ferment.

  2. Skim off the yeast during fermentation.

  3. When fermentation slows after about 2 days, transfer the beer to stone bottles.

Bottle

  1. Tie down the corks with packthread.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

Explore the science

What each ingredient does

Molasses
Provides sugars that the yeast ferments, and adds sweetness and body to the beer.
Extract of spruce
Gives the beer its characteristic spruce aroma and flavor.
Yeast
Ferments the sugars into alcohol and carbon dioxide, which carbonates the beer.

The step that matters

Cool the mixture until lukewarm before adding the yeast. Yeast is killed by very hot liquid, so the mixture must cool enough for the yeast to survive and start fermenting well.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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