For brewing Spruce Beer

History

Amelia Simmons's spruce beer is a molasses small beer: four ounces of hops are boiled in a gallon of water, then combined with sixteen gallons of warm water, two gallons of molasses, and eight ounces of essence of spruce dissolved in a quart of water, cast into a clean cask, roused with half a pint of emptins, and left to work about a week. This molasses-and-spruce formula was the standard shape of the drink; an earlier recipe printed in 1757 likewise took the tops and branches of the spruce tree, boiled for three hours and strained into casks with a quantity of molasses. The essence Simmons calls for was a commercial extract, made by boiling spruce boughs or the spring tips and reducing the liquid to a condensed, highly flavored syrup.

Spruce beer draws its flavor from the tree itself — its buds, its needles, or a concentrated essence — and was long established in the American kitchen by 1796. The drink had been brewed at home since the seventeenth century, with hops, spruce limbs, and sugar rather than grain, and its fermented, alcoholic form — usually made from red or black spruce — was a familiar drink across the colonial American and eastern Canadian settlements. Beyond refreshment it carried a medical reputation. Some Indigenous peoples of North America turned to it against scurvy through the winter, when fresh fruit was out of reach, since the young shoots of spruces and pines supply vitamin C on their own, and the practice of treating scurvy with evergreen-needle drinks was later picked up by the British Royal Navy, spruce being regularly added to ship-brewed beer during eighteenth-century explorations. Armies valued it on the same grounds: a 1759 military order directed that spruce beer be brewed for the health and conveniency of the troops.

Simmons herself makes none of these claims. Her entry is purely procedural, a matter of quantities, a clean cask, a week's working, and a spoonful of molasses dropped into every bottle, with nothing of scurvy, ships, or where she learned the method. The reputation that surrounds the drink lives in the naval and military record rather than on her page, and the book leaves the reader to supply the history it does not keep.

Ingredients

• 4 ounces hops
• 1 gallon water
• 16 gallons warm water
• 2 gallons molasses
• 8 ounces essence of spruce
• 1 quart water
• 1/2 pint emptins
• 1 spoonful molasses

Instructions

1. Boil four ounces of hops for half an hour in one gallon of water, then strain the hop water.
2. Add sixteen gallons of warm water, two gallons of molasses, and eight ounces of essence of spruce dissolved in one quart of water.
3. Put it in a clean cask and shake it well together.
4. Add half a pint of emptins, then let it stand and work one week (less in very warm weather).
5. When drawn off to bottle, add one spoonful of molasses to every bottle.