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Drink

White Spruce-Beer

A fermented beverage made from water, loaf sugar, spruce essence, and fresh yeast.

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

Ingredients

Directions

Make the wort

  1. Boil the water with the loaf sugar and essence of spruce.

  2. Skim the mixture.

  3. Transfer it to a vessel and let it cool nearly.

  4. Add the fresh yeast.

Ferment and bottle

  1. Allow the beer to ferment for 3 days.

  2. Bung the cask and bottle it after 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.

Explore the science

What each ingredient does

Loaf sugar
Provides sweetness and the sugars that yeast ferments into alcohol and carbonation.
Essence of spruce
Supplies the characteristic resinous, aromatic flavour of the beer.
Fresh yeast
Ferments the sugars, producing alcohol and carbon dioxide that carbonates the beer.

The step that matters

Adding the yeast after cooling. Yeast is killed by very hot liquid, so the mixture must cool nearly to room temperature before the yeast goes in. Adding it too early can stop fermentation before it starts.

“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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