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Spruce Beer

A fermented beverage made from water, treacle, ginger, spruce fir, and yeast.

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

Why it works: Ginger and tea work together. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 216 recipes. Both carry (e)-2-octenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Spruce Beer

Ingredients

Directions

Make the wort

  1. Boil 10 gallons of water, 6 pounds of treacle, and 3 ounces of bruised ginger together for 30 minutes.

  2. Add 2 pounds of outer sprigs of spruce fir and boil for 5 minutes.

  3. Strain the mixture through a fine sieve.

Ferment and bottle

  1. When the mixture is milk-warm, pour it into a cask.

  2. Stir in 1 tea-cupful of good yeast.

  3. After 1-2 days of fermentation, seal the cask.

  4. Bottle the beer the next day.

  5. 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

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. Ginger + teatop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together216 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e)-2-octenal (fatty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Treacle
Provides the sugar that yeast ferments into alcohol and carbonation.
Yeast
Ferments the sugars, producing alcohol and carbon dioxide that carbonate the beer.
Outer sprigs of spruce fir
Adds resinous, pine-like aroma and flavour to the beer.
Bruised ginger
Adds a spicy, aromatic flavour to the brew.

The step that matters

Cooling the wort to milk-warm before adding yeast. Yeast works best at moderate temperatures. If the liquid is still hot, it can kill the yeast and stall fermentation, while a fully cold liquid ferments slowly.

“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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