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Spruce Beer

A fermented beverage made with sugar, water, yeast, spruce essence, and lemon.

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

Spruce Beer

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Mix the sugar and water in a large container.

  2. Add the yeast, essence of spruce, and lemon juice.

  3. Let the mixture stand for 12 hours.

  4. Bottle the mixture for storage, especially in warm weather.

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

White sugar
Provides the sugar that the yeast ferments into carbonation and alcohol.
Yeast
Ferments the sugar, producing carbon dioxide that makes the beer fizzy.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the flavour of the spruce beer.

The step that matters

Bottle the mixture for storage, especially in warm weather.. Yeast is still fermenting, so carbon dioxide keeps building inside sealed bottles. In warm weather fermentation runs faster, raising the risk of bottles over-pressurising and bursting.

“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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