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White Spruce Beer

A fermented beverage made from sugar, water, spruce essence, yeast, and optional lemon peel.

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

Why it works: Sugar and lemon are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 18% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 53,532 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

White Spruce Beer

Ingredients

Directions

Make the beer

  1. Dissolve the loaf sugar in 5 gallons of water.

  2. Add enough essence of spruce to flavor the mixture.

  3. Stir in 1 cup of good yeast.

  4. If desired, add a little lemon peel.

  5. Allow the mixture to ferment.

Bottle

  1. Once fermented, bottle it up tightly.

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

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Sugar + lemontop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

Sugar and lemon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 53,532 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Loaf sugar
Provides the fermentable sugar that yeast converts into alcohol and carbon dioxide.
Yeast
Drives fermentation, converting sugar into alcohol and carbon dioxide that gives the beer its fizz.
Essence of spruce
Supplies the aroma and resinous flavor that defines this spruce beer.

The step that matters

Bottle it up tightly once fermented. Carbon dioxide from fermentation builds pressure in sealed bottles. If the fermentation is not complete, or the bottles are not sealed well, pressure can build unevenly and bottles may burst or go flat.

“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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