For Brewing Spruce Beer

Disclaimer: Finished product contains alcohol. 

A brew of spruce essence and molasses. Afraid of how the final results might taste, I cut the molasses and added some brown sugar in its place. According to my calculations a half gallon of molasses has 1,792 grams of sugar, nutritionally, and that is how many grams of sugar went into this brew. If you would like to try substituting maple syrup or honey, let that be a guide.

This was a surprisingly easy recipe to follow. I thought that I would have to search high and low for spruce essence, but I found some right at my local brew supply.  

For Brewing Spruce Beer

Take four ounces of hops, let them boil half an hour, in one gallon of water, strain the hop water, then add sixteen gallons of warm water, two gallons of molasses, eight ounces of essence of spruce, dissolved in one quart of water, put it in a clean cask, then shake it well together, add half a pint of emptins, then let it stand and work one week, if very warm weather less time will do, when it is drawn off to bottle, add one spoonful of molasses to every bottle.

¼ batch= 5 gallons

• Water 4 Gallons
• Hops 1 Oz. whole hops (mine were assorted hops courtesy of farmer friends Katie and Ryan)
• Molasses 35 Fl Oz.
• Brown Sugar 1 ¾ Lb
• Spruce Essence 2 Fl oz
• Yeast Brewers yeast enough for 5 Gallons (I used White Labs English Ale Yeast)

1. Boil your hops in a gallon of water for ½ hour.
2. Meanwhile, fill your sterilized brew tub with 3 gallons of water, your sugars, and the spruce essence.
3. Strain the hop water into the brew tub and “shake it well together” (luckily you are only dealing with a quarter batch).
4. Test the gravity. Ensuring that the temperature is appropriate, add your yeast. Give it one big stir and cover with a lid and air lock. My initial gravity reading projected an 8% brew. Maybe I'll add a little less sugar next time.
5. Let it bubble till it stops. This should take a few days/weeks.
6. Add sugar for secondary fermentation (I don't recommend trying to get spoonfuls of molasses into individual beer bottles, that sounds like a messy plan).
7. Bottle! (I know that this is an 18^th century recipe, but please sterilize your equipment and bottles somehow!) 

Initial taste prior to fermentation is surprisingly similar to cola. I think that this might be due in part to the spruce essence, which has some modern things in it like sodium benzonate, gum acacia & alginate, whatever those things are. Amelia Simmons has us dissolve the spruce essence in water, which leads me to believe that it was something more solid, and I am also thinking much stronger. Would 18th century spruce essence be concentrated spruce sap, or concentrated boiled foliage? When you boil spruce sap, do you get something similar to pine tar? 

I'll let you know in a few weeks how this is doing, and post details about secondary fermentation and such. I feel like a wimp for substituting some of the molasses, but I was kind of worried about the taste. I would really like to try this with maple sugar next time. It would be a far from historically accurate thing to do, but it would probably taste pretty good.

Happy Brewing! 

UPDATE (May 23rd)


The spruce beer has been bottled and tasted. It took for ever to finish primary fermentation. Maybe the molasses ferments super slowly because it is harder and more complex for the yeast to eat? In any case, it actually tastes pretty decent. And decent is good enough, when we consider the options for home brewing ladies of the 18th century. 


What we have is a drinkable fermented beverage that would have been easily made by house wives all over New England at the turn of the 18th century. I can see how this drink would have become quite popular. Beer and cider are farmers drinks. For cider, you need an orchard, a mill and a press. For beer, growing, harvesting, milling and malting your barley is a complex process. However, any housewife in New England at the turn of the 18th century could find herself some good cheap molasses and a handful of hops. When drinking our spruce beer at our comfortable table, we can take pleasure in the fact that we hardly had to lift a finger for the making of our drink. While we sit with our flowing bowl, the slaves on the sugar plantations are toiling away under the hot sun to send us the thick dark molasses that we will ferment, bake into our indian puddings, and smear on our jonny cakes. It is no wonder that people like Jefferson were advocates of maple sugar.


 Coming soon: maple beer.