Your globetrotting liquor reporter spent a few days in Montreal last week, also known as the traditional home of Spruce Beer.
For those not familiar with this uniquely Canadian drink, it goes all the way back to the 1500’s, when the early French settlers of Quebec learned from the First Nations how to brew up a concoction made with spruce tips.
It turns out that spruce is loaded with vitamin C, which was a great boon in those days of scurvy, particularly during the winter when fresh fruits were unavailable.
Spruce Beer was confined to Quebec for several decades, but the British Navy took the idea back to Europe, boiling spruce needles in their tea on the long voyage home to ward off scurvy. It even became quite popular in Western Europe in the 1800’s as a health beverage.
The traditional recipe is made from water, sugar, yeast, and the oils extracted from spruce boughs. In those pre-carbonation days, the fizziness was achieved by adding a pinch of yeast to each bottle before capping, which would then ferment slowly over the next week or so, and then be ready to serve.
There was a bit of a scandal back in that decadent decade of the 80’s, when a local soda company in Quebec was marketing their Spruce Beer as a soft drink, similar to Root Beer.
Unfortunately, they didn’t get the yeast measurements quite right, so the supposedly kid-friendly beverage had an alcohol content of around 3.5%, right about the same as a Coors Light.
As you might imagine, the parents were less pleased about the alcohol content than the kids, and that soda company quickly went out of business, and the Canadian landscape was largely deprived of commercial bottlings of Spruce Beer until the 1990s.
Although the commercial bottlings ceased, many of our fromage-munching cousins from La Belle Province continued to make Spruce Beer at home, often brewing up huge batches in the family bathtub.
Eventually, the craft beer people caught wind of the idea, and started adding evergreen needles to the boil when making a traditional barley-based beer, ending up with something that tastes like beer with a hint of Christmas tree.
Astute readers in the audience may recall that Calgary’s own Big Rock made a beer called the Spruce Goose last year, which your humble narrator was lucky enough to sample at one of those beer tasting events that I am constantly attending, in order to bring you, the faithful reader, the best in beer news.
While Big Rock’s Spruce Goose was only available as part of a limited release variety pack for a few months last winter, I recall it as having hints of Pine Sol, but in a good way, followed with a minty finish on a coppery amber ale. The resin aromas from the spruce tips were balanced by the toffee malts used in the brew.
Looking to our eastern shores, Big Spruce Brewing on Cape Breton Island is a long-time brewer of Spruce Beer, as you might have surmised by their name.
While they brew traditional English Ales for most of the year, they pull out all the stops each July when the spruce trees are budding, and make up a huge batch of their Tip of the Spear Spruce Tip IPA.
This is basically their year-round IPA style, married with the freshly dropped tips of the Cape Breton black spruce tree, and is a favourite of the maritime beer geeks of our fair country.
Sadly, Big Spruce Brewing doesn’t distribute outside of Nova Scotia, but a nearby brewery has stepped in to fill the void.
Garrison Brewing out of Halifax occasionally produces a one-off run of Spruce Beer, and their 2015 release is a Spruce Beer aged in used rum barrels.
The aging in rum-soaked oak adds a molasses undertone to the beer that is balanced by the fresh spicy bite of the spruce boughs added during the boil. Only a limited supply was sent to Alberta, so you’ll have to check www.liquorconnect.com to find it in a store near you.
While Spruce Beer probably won’t be replacing Coors Light on the draught tap at your local drinking establishment, it’s a refreshing change in a sea of bland macrobrews that your intrepid liquor reporter is planning to enjoy on his next visit back to Montreal.
