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SPRUCE BEER (another way)
This is made by adding the essence of spruce to water in which sugar or treacle has been dissolved in the proportion of about four ounces of essence of spruce to ten pounds of sugar, or three quarts of treacle, and ten or eleven gallons of water, and with about half a pint of yeast. For flavouring, various spices are added. "A similar beverage," says a writer in "Chambers' Encyclopaedia," "is made largely in the north of Europe from the buds of the Norway spruce, and is known as Black Beer, that of Danzig being the most famous. The antiscorbutic beer of the Russian army pharmacopoeia is made by mixing spruce tops and fresh horse-radish-root with common beer, ginger and Calamus aromaticus being added for flavouring, and, after fermentation, a little cream of tartar, tincture of mustard, and proof spirit."
A small beer rather than a brewed ale: no malt, no boil, just sugar water flavoured with conifer and set to ferment. The quantities are on a household-barrel scale and need dividing before you start.
- Scale it downThe batch as given is ten or eleven gallons. Divided by ten it becomes roughly 1 gallon of water, 1 lb of sugar (or a scant 1 1/4 cups treacle), a scant half-ounce of spruce essence and a tablespoon or so of active yeast.
- Treacle means molassesBritish treacle here is the dark unrefined syrup, not golden syrup. Three quarts of treacle stands in for ten pounds of sugar, so the two are treated as roughly interchangeable by sweetening power.
- Essence of spruceThis was a thick, tarry concentrate boiled down from spruce or fir tips and sold by grocers and chemists. Modern spruce or fir essential oils are far more concentrated and not all are sold as food grade; the closest safe equivalent is a strong infusion of fresh spring spruce tips, added to taste. Four ounces of essence to ten gallons is a starting point only, not a reliable conversion.
- Half a pint of yeastThat is liquid barm skimmed from a working brew, mostly water. A single sachet of ale or bread yeast will do the same job in a gallon batch.
- Strength and fermentationA pound of sugar per gallon gives a starting gravity somewhere around 1.040, and up to roughly 5 per cent alcohol if it ferments right out; bottled young, as these beers were, it will be weaker. Ferment loosely covered at room temperature for two or three days, until the vigour has dropped off.
- The bottling hingeSugar-water ferments have nothing to slow them down, and nineteenth-century spruce beer was bottled while still lively. If you bottle before fermentation is nearly finished, use thick-walled bottles built for pressure and keep them cold; ordinary wine or screw-top bottles can burst.
- Skip the calamusThe Russian army version quoted at the end includes Calamus aromaticus, sweet flag. Most commercial calamus contains beta-asarone and its use as a food flavouring is now restricted in the EU and US. Leave it out; ginger and horseradish carry the flavour on their own.
- YieldThe reduced gallon gives about eight to ten glasses. Drink it young, within a week or two, as it does not keep or improve.
Spruce beer belongs to the long tradition of small beers brewed at home for daily drinking, and it earned its place in ships' stores because conifer tips were believed to guard against scurvy. Captain Cook's journals record brewing spruce beer from local trees during his Pacific voyages as a guard against scurvy, and the drink was a staple in colonial North America and the timber camps of Canada and Maine, where spruce and molasses were both cheap and at hand. The "Black Beer" of Danzig mentioned in the quotation was a genuinely famous export, a dark, thick, heavily sweet brew shipped across northern Europe.