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Drink

Spruce Beer

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

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Spruce Beer

Spruce Beer

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the wort

  1. Pour 8 gallons of cold water into a barrel.

  2. Add 8 gallons of boiling water.

  3. Stir in 6 tablespoons of essence of spruce and 16 pounds of molasses.

  4. When the mixture is cool, add 1 pint of yeast.

Ferment and bottle

  1. Roll the cask or shake it well.

  2. Keep in a warm place for 2 days with the bung open.

  3. Once fermentation subsides, bottle it or transfer to stone jars and cork well.

  4. It will be ready to use in a week.

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 sugar that yeast ferments into alcohol and gives the beer its dark, rich sweetness.
Yeast
Ferments the sugars, producing alcohol and carbonation during the fermentation period.
Essence of spruce
Supplies the characteristic resinous, aromatic flavour of the beer.

The step that matters

Adding the yeast only when the mixture is cool. Yeast is killed or weakened by very hot liquid, so the wort must be cool before the yeast goes in for fermentation to start reliably.

“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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