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Spruce Beer
Allow an ounce of hops and a tablespoonful of ginger to a gallon of water. When well boiled strain it, and put in a pint of molasses and half an ounce or less of the essence of spruce; when cold add a teacupful of yeast; put it in a clean, tight cask (a jug will do), and let it ferment for a day or two; then bottle it for use-you will find it good after three days.
A small beer of the old kind: quick, low in alcohol, and sweet enough to still be fermenting when it reaches the glass. The single thing to get right is bottle pressure, since sugar plus live yeast in a sealed bottle is what makes this drinkable and also what makes it dangerous to store.
- Scale as writtenThe proportions are per gallon: 1 oz hops, 1 tablespoon ginger (the recipe does not say ground or fresh), 1 pint molasses, up to 1/2 oz essence of spruce. A teacupful of yeast is roughly 1/2 to 3/4 cup of liquid barm; a rough modern equivalent is about 1/2 teaspoon of dry ale yeast per gallon.
- Essence of spruceThis was a commercial concentrate boiled down from spruce twigs, sold by druggists and grocers. Food-grade spruce essence is now hard to find, and spruce essential oil is not the same product and is not a food ingredient. Fresh young spruce tips simmered in the wort give a similar resinous flavor; the original's "or less" suggests the flavor was easily overdone.
- HopsAn ounce of whole leaf hops per gallon is a lot by modern standards for a drink this sweet. Boiling them the full time the recipe implies extracts bitterness; ten to fifteen minutes gives aroma and much less bite.
- Molasses, not blackstrapPeriod molasses was generally a lighter sugar-refining syrup. Blackstrap is far more bitter and mineral; unsulphured dark molasses is closer.
- Ferment cool and briefly"A day or two" probably assumes a cool cellar. In a warm kitchen fermentation may be visibly active within hours, and the two-day mark arrives sooner.
- Bottle pressure is the real hazardBottling a beer still full of unfermented molasses means carbonation keeps building. Use thick-walled bottles made for pressure, never screw-top wine or juice bottles, and refrigerate after three days to slow the yeast. Left at room temperature for weeks these will burst.
- StrengthSmall beers of this kind were generally weak, on the order of a couple of percent alcohol, and here fermentation is cut short after a day or two. It is not zero, and the figure depends entirely on how long fermentation runs.
- YieldA gallon fills roughly ten twelve-ounce bottles. Drink within a week or two; there are no preservatives and no long conditioning here.
Spruce beer belongs to the family of small beers brewed at home from whatever aromatic material was at hand, and in North America that meant conifer tips. It is closely associated with the northern colonies and with shipboard and garrison life, where a brew made from spruce or fir was valued as an antiscorbutic; eighteenth-century British military records mention spruce beer rations, and the practice is generally traced to Indigenous use of conifer decoctions, later adopted by European settlers. Essence of spruce could be bought ready-made, which is why a family cookbook could treat brewing as a three-day kitchen job rather than a craft. The sweet, lightly fizzy, barely alcoholic small beer was understood as a refreshment for the household, the same category as ginger beer and root beer, both of which outlived it in commercial form.