doug, do you find that adding spruce tips at the beginning of the boil is worthwhile? I didn't find that it added much flavor.
What type of spruce did you collect your tips from?
Also, your recipe looks great, except that I think that pine nuts taste like moldy dirt
I haven't experimented with additions at different times. I did some reading around HBT, and the consensus seemed to be that spruce works kind of the opposite of hops. Long boils give smoother flavor, and late additions provide more bitterness. I couldn't find any recipes with tasting notes, and I only had one shot at making this, so had to commit to something.
I don't know the spruce variety. I was handed a baggie with 8 oz of spruce tips that I could choose to use however I wanted in the beer.
The pine nuts were required by the competition rules. Iron Brewer is patterned after the Food Channel show "Iron Chef." Competitors are given two unusual ingredients which they must incorporate into something tasty. And, the two target ingredients should be evident in the final product. I'm just glad I wasn't part of the previous round, when the ingredients were fruit cocktail (yes the kind from a can) and Froot Loops. A lot of those batches ended up in waste treatment plants without the benefit of kidney filtering first.
I roasted the pine nuts, so at least they should have a "roasty, moldy dirt" taste.
One of the reasons for roasting was to develop more flavor, but the other was to try to extract some of the oils from the nuts. Roasting was done with a couple of layers of paper towels under and over the nuts. I also blotted the nuts with the paper towels after roasting, while still warm. Didn't get nearly as much oil as I expected. Cooled nuts went into a food processor and ground into a coarse pesto. The pesto was included with the grains during mashing.
I chose low flavor profile malts and a small charge of a neutral bittering hop to hopefully not cover up the flavor of the pine nuts. The Carapils is intended to counteract the head killing properties of the pine nut oils. I'll see how well that worked when we taste the carbed up brew tomorrow. I also took great care when racking to the keg, not to draw from the trub or surface to try to avoid transferring any nut oils to the keg.
The roasted nuts had a color like a C60 or C80 barley, but added almost no color to the finished beer. It's the lighted colored beer I've ever made.
As I said, the beer has a pleasant, smooth spruce taste that is not overpowering, but definitely spruce. I'm not sure I can even taste the pine nuts (which could cost me in the Iron Brewer judging), but then I don't have the most refined palate. Have to see if any of our BJCP guys can pick it out.
Brew on