Shawn Hargreaves
Well-Known Member
Inspired by the Alaskan Winter Seasonal, I wanted to try brewing a spruce flavored beer. After much online research, I discovered a surprising lack of good information about this. Much of what info does exist is contradictory, hearsay from people who never actually tried it, or reports of failed attempts.
After several experiments and one successful brew, I decided to write up everything I have learned. Think of this as the post I would have loved to find three months ago
First, some things I read about but did not try:
There are various recipes for a "founding fathers" beer, made with whole spruce branches, molasses, and sugar. By all accounts (including a friend of mine who tried this once) the result is foul, of interest only as a historical curiosity.
There are also bottles of spruce extract available in homebrew stores, but I could not find anyone who liked the beer they produce. "overwhelming" and "creosote" are common descriptions!
So here's what I did try: find a spruce tree and taste all possible parts of it. Bark, woody twigs, older needles, and sap are all surprisingly similar in flavor, and extremely nasty. Creosote it is, a taste that, once on your tongue, is virtually impossible to get rid of and not remotely pleasant.
The only nice tasting part of the tree is the new growth tips, which appear on the end of branches in the spring (June and July on the llower slopes of the Cascades in Western Washington). These are the soft, pale green needles (easily distinguished from the dark green older growth), up to where the soft new twig turns to older woody growth. The tips are delicious: powerful citrus, undertones of bitter tannins, and a complex herbal aftertaste almost reminiscent of root beer. They are great just to munch on while hiking, and can be surprisingly different in flavor even between adjacent trees of the same species. I tasted many trees, and harvested only from the best tasting.
Online opinions differ radically as to how to proceed from this point. I found advice everywhere between "dangerously intense flavor, as little as 1 oz can be overpowering" to "chuck in a pound or more", with people recommending boil times from an hour to just a few minutes. So I did some tests:
Making a tea by steeping spruce tips in boiling water produces, well, water. No flavor at all, and minimal aroma. So late addition is a waste of time.
Boiling for 5 minutes produces a mild spruce flavor, again with minimal aroma.
Boiling for 30 minutes produces a stronger but otherwise identical spruce flavor. When suitably diluted, this version tasted exactly like the 5 minute boil. I concluded that spruce flavor does not boil off easily, and takes time to extract, so a long boil is a good idea.
Estimating based on the intensity of my 30 minute boil test, I decided to go with 5 oz tips for a full 60 minute boil.
The citrus and complex herbal flavors came across quite strongly in my boil test, with only a low amount of bitterness, so I decided not to significantly alter my normal hop bittering. I chose a malt based recipe with no late hopping, to leave plenty of room for this flavor to come through.
One thing I did not try is soaking spruce tips in alcohol, so I have no data as to whether dry-sprucing might be a useful technique.
My partial mash recipe started with an ESB I have brewed several times before, but I changed the yeast and hopping to Americanize it:
OG: 1.058
FG: 1.014
Alcohol: 5.78%
IBU: 33.1
2.5 lb Maris Otter
0.75 lb Biscuit Malt
0.5 lb Crystal 20
0.5 lb Crystal 60
0.5 oz Molasses
1 oz Cascade Hops [8.9%] (First Wort)
5 oz Spruce Tips (Boil 60.0 min)
4 lb Light Dry Extract (late addition)
Wyeast Labs #1056 (American Ale)
I opened the first bottle this weekend. It's pretty cloudy, although I think that's more due to my poor sparging than spruce related. Nice head on first pour, but poor retention. Aroma is primarily malt, initial flavor a complex sweetness with surprisingly solid and complex tannic bitterness. The spruce and hops melded really well in this regard, so it's hard to tell where one leaves off and the other begins (my wife said it tasted like a nice hoppy beer, just not like any kind of hop she had tasted before). The spruce flavor comes through most strongly in the aftertaste, but even there is not overpowering. Enough to be interesting, but not so much that a casual drinker would necessarily even notice the unusual ingredient.
Overall I'm very happy with this brew, and it is definitely something I will be repeating. Combining spruce with citrusy hops worked really well, so I'm curious to try this in something more aggressive like a west cost IPA.
After several experiments and one successful brew, I decided to write up everything I have learned. Think of this as the post I would have loved to find three months ago
First, some things I read about but did not try:
There are various recipes for a "founding fathers" beer, made with whole spruce branches, molasses, and sugar. By all accounts (including a friend of mine who tried this once) the result is foul, of interest only as a historical curiosity.
There are also bottles of spruce extract available in homebrew stores, but I could not find anyone who liked the beer they produce. "overwhelming" and "creosote" are common descriptions!
So here's what I did try: find a spruce tree and taste all possible parts of it. Bark, woody twigs, older needles, and sap are all surprisingly similar in flavor, and extremely nasty. Creosote it is, a taste that, once on your tongue, is virtually impossible to get rid of and not remotely pleasant.
The only nice tasting part of the tree is the new growth tips, which appear on the end of branches in the spring (June and July on the llower slopes of the Cascades in Western Washington). These are the soft, pale green needles (easily distinguished from the dark green older growth), up to where the soft new twig turns to older woody growth. The tips are delicious: powerful citrus, undertones of bitter tannins, and a complex herbal aftertaste almost reminiscent of root beer. They are great just to munch on while hiking, and can be surprisingly different in flavor even between adjacent trees of the same species. I tasted many trees, and harvested only from the best tasting.
Online opinions differ radically as to how to proceed from this point. I found advice everywhere between "dangerously intense flavor, as little as 1 oz can be overpowering" to "chuck in a pound or more", with people recommending boil times from an hour to just a few minutes. So I did some tests:
Making a tea by steeping spruce tips in boiling water produces, well, water. No flavor at all, and minimal aroma. So late addition is a waste of time.
Boiling for 5 minutes produces a mild spruce flavor, again with minimal aroma.
Boiling for 30 minutes produces a stronger but otherwise identical spruce flavor. When suitably diluted, this version tasted exactly like the 5 minute boil. I concluded that spruce flavor does not boil off easily, and takes time to extract, so a long boil is a good idea.
Estimating based on the intensity of my 30 minute boil test, I decided to go with 5 oz tips for a full 60 minute boil.
The citrus and complex herbal flavors came across quite strongly in my boil test, with only a low amount of bitterness, so I decided not to significantly alter my normal hop bittering. I chose a malt based recipe with no late hopping, to leave plenty of room for this flavor to come through.
One thing I did not try is soaking spruce tips in alcohol, so I have no data as to whether dry-sprucing might be a useful technique.
My partial mash recipe started with an ESB I have brewed several times before, but I changed the yeast and hopping to Americanize it:
OG: 1.058
FG: 1.014
Alcohol: 5.78%
IBU: 33.1
2.5 lb Maris Otter
0.75 lb Biscuit Malt
0.5 lb Crystal 20
0.5 lb Crystal 60
0.5 oz Molasses
1 oz Cascade Hops [8.9%] (First Wort)
5 oz Spruce Tips (Boil 60.0 min)
4 lb Light Dry Extract (late addition)
Wyeast Labs #1056 (American Ale)
I opened the first bottle this weekend. It's pretty cloudy, although I think that's more due to my poor sparging than spruce related. Nice head on first pour, but poor retention. Aroma is primarily malt, initial flavor a complex sweetness with surprisingly solid and complex tannic bitterness. The spruce and hops melded really well in this regard, so it's hard to tell where one leaves off and the other begins (my wife said it tasted like a nice hoppy beer, just not like any kind of hop she had tasted before). The spruce flavor comes through most strongly in the aftertaste, but even there is not overpowering. Enough to be interesting, but not so much that a casual drinker would necessarily even notice the unusual ingredient.
Overall I'm very happy with this brew, and it is definitely something I will be repeating. Combining spruce with citrusy hops worked really well, so I'm curious to try this in something more aggressive like a west cost IPA.
