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Drink

Spruce Beer, Common

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

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

Ingredients

Directions

Make the wort

  1. In a cask, combine 4 gallons of cold water with 4 gallons of boiling water.

  2. Add the molasses and essence of spruce to the mixture.

  3. Once the heat is reduced to just warm, stir in the yeast.

Ferment

  1. Shake the barrel well and leave the bung out for two days.

Bottle and age

  1. Bottle immediately using strong stone quart bottles, securing the corks tightly.

  2. Store the bottles in dry sawdust or sand.

  3. After two to three weeks, the beer will be ready to drink.

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.

Explore the science

What each ingredient does

Molasses
Provides sugar that the yeast ferments, creating alcohol and sweetness.
Yeast
Ferments the sugars into alcohol and carbon dioxide, which carbonates the beer.
Essence of spruce
Supplies the dominant aromatic, resinous spruce flavour.

The step that matters

Adding the yeast when the liquid is only warm. Yeast cells are killed by very hot liquid. Cooling the mixture to just warm keeps them alive so they can start fermenting the sugars evenly.

“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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