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Spruce Beer
Dissolve sixteen pounds of treacle in eight gallons of water. Strain the liquor into a cask, and add eight gallons of cold water and six table-spoonfuls of the essence of spruce. Keep in a warm place, and when the liquor is new-milk-warm, stir briskly into it half a pint of good fresh yeast. Leave it for a day or two until fermentation ceases, then bung it up closely. The following day it may be bottled, and can be used in a week. Sometimes the beer is flavoured by boiling for this quantity a tea-cupful of bruised ginger, a tea-spoonful of allspice, and three ounces of hops in a small quantity of the liquor, and adding this to the rest. When the outer sprigs of the spruce fir can be obtained, they may be boiled for a few minutes in a little of the liquor, and this decoction may be used instead of the essence. A pound of the sprigs will be equivalent to a pound and a half of the essence.
A sixteen-gallon batch of molasses small beer, flavoured with spruce. The proportions are sound but the volume is a brewery's worth by domestic standards, and the bottling instruction is the part that needs rethinking.
- Treacle means molassesSixteen pounds of dark treacle is the entire sugar source here — there is no malt. Modern unsulphured blackstrap or a lighter cooking molasses both work, though blackstrap gives a heavier, more mineral flavour than the Victorian article.
- Scale it downThe finished volume is sixteen gallons. Divide everything by sixteen for a one-gallon test batch: 1 lb treacle, 1 gallon water total, about 1 teaspoon essence of spruce, and a pinch of dried yeast rather than half a pint of barm.
- Essence of spruceA commercial concentrated extract made by boiling down spruce branches and tips, sold by chemists and grocers in the period and now sold mainly as spruce or fir tip syrup and flavouring extracts. If you substitute an essential oil the dose is a fraction of what is called for here; oils are far stronger than the old boiled-down essences.
- If you gather your own sprigsThe recipe's alternative uses the soft outer growth of spruce fir. Use only true spruce (Picea) or balsam fir tips, positively identified. Yew is deadly and grows in the same hedgerows and churchyards; several other conifers are unpleasant rather than dangerous, but the identification has to be certain.
- "New-milk-warm" is too warmThat phrase means blood heat, roughly 95-98F, which is what old bakers' barm liked. Modern ale yeast is better pitched at 65-70F; fermenting hot gives harsh, solvent-like flavours in a beverage this lightly hopped.
- Half a pint of good fresh yeastThis is liquid barm skimmed from a working brew or bakery. Substitute about half a teaspoon of dried ale yeast for a one-gallon batch, or two to three packets for the full sixteen.
- Do not bottle the next dayBunging the cask when "fermentation ceases" and bottling twenty-four hours later means bottling beer that is still working. In thick period stoneware and corked glass this made a lively drink; in modern thin bottles, or anything with a screw cap, it makes shrapnel. Ferment to a stable gravity over several days, then prime with a measured amount of sugar and use proper crown-capped beer bottles.
- The spiced versionThe ginger, allspice and 3 oz hops are boiled in a portion of the liquor and the strained decoction returned to the bulk. Three ounces of hops across sixteen gallons is barely bitter — it acts as a preservative and a foil to the molasses rather than as a flavour in its own right.
- Strength and yieldWith a pound of molasses to the gallon this finishes around 2 to 3 per cent alcohol: a small beer, meant to be drunk young and by the tankard. "Can be used in a week" is accurate; it is not likely to keep well for long.
Spruce beer belongs to the long tradition of small beers brewed at home from molasses rather than malt, and it was valued as much for health as for refreshment. Conifer-tip drinks were widely believed to be antiscorbutic, and spruce beer was brewed by naval and colonial expeditions in the northern Atlantic world — it is often noted in connection with Cook's voyages and with British garrisons in Canada, where spruce was abundant and barley was not. The bottled "essence of spruce" that the recipe assumes as the default ingredient tells you how far that folk brew had been commercialised by the late nineteenth century: a household could buy the flavour in a bottle and never see a tree, with the gathered sprigs reduced to a country alternative and given a helpful conversion rate.