Home Brewing Knowledge Base


General Brewing

  • Homebrewing
    Discuss your brewing techniques, brewing styles, and any tips you might have. Use our community to ask about these things as well.
  • Bottling
    Tips and tricks to finding a home for your beer.
  • Equipment
    Show off your equipment, share tips on maintaining and sanitizing.
  • Terms
    Common home brewing terms and jargon for the new home brewer.

Recipes

  • Homebrew Recipes
    Share your recipes and comment on other's recipes that you try.
  • Beer Related Recipes
    Do you have a good recipe that uses beer (or wine)? Know of any good marinade's? Let us know about them here.

Alternative Brewing

  • Brewing Cider
    Techniques for brewing cider. Tips, tricks, questions, they all go here.
  • Wine
    The art of distilling wine. Discuss tricks to the trade, your successes (or failures), and the joy of distilling wine.
  • Mead
    A wine made from fermented honey and water. Discuss brewing this favorite of the Romans and Greeks.

Home Brewing Community

  • The Pub
    A place to discuss things not about brewing, beer, wine, etc. This is a place to get to know our other members outside of our shared enjoyment of home brewing.
  • Beer / Wine Talk
    Talk about your favorite beers and wines (and meads and ciders, etc) with other beer and wine lovers.

Brew Market

  • Selling Brewing Stuff
    Whether its equipment or ingredients, if you need to get rid of some of your brewing stuff, do it here.
  • Buying Brewing Stuff
    Why pay regular price when you can request what you need from our brewing community?

Home Brewing Products

  • Home Brewing Supplies
  • Home Brewing Kits
  • Home Brewing Recipe Book
  • Home Brewing Books


Home Brewing Articles


Pages: 1 2 3

spruce beer

wboard82,
First, welcome aboard. 
If you have access to both Blue & White Spruce, you can just pick a candle, wash it, if you are so inclined, bruise, then smell & chew.
I've used both Norway Spruce & Blue, and the Norway has more bitterness.



 

I've brewed a spruce beer using the extract... some people loved it and wanted to drink it all. I however though it needed less spruce. I only used 1oz of extract for 5 gal in a light wheat recipe and man, it was damn near overpowering. Next time I'll either use 1/2 oz or up the malt in the brew to balance it out. I found it like drinking pine-sol.... and the effects were similar lol jk

 

I also visited Montreal often as a kid in the late 60's and through the '70's, and really enjoyed the "DENISCOLA" (pronounced deh' nee kola) brand of 'Spruce Biere" and another flavor "Deniscola" called "nectar". As Killigan stated, it was an unusual drink, similar to pine flavored gingerale, except it was crystal clear, just like "Sprite", and highly carbonated, with an INTENSE sweet spruce flavor. I used to bring back CASES of the 1 Quart green glass bottles to Florida to freak out my friends. Many years later, returning to Canada as an adult, I found that "Deniscola"  had sold out to another company. The Spruce Biere as I knew it was discontinued, and the big dark green glass bottles of Spruce Biere were no longer available. The new "Deniscola" version of the flavor was much weaker and they only sold it in metal cans. Bummer.
So now I am going to try and use spruce extract to replicate the intense flavor I remember from the past.

 

I just racked my Montana on my Mind to secondary.  Most of my spruce beers are dark, and the spruce isn't really supposed to be prominent, but to blend with the hops, so that it's a little hard to figure out what it is.
Only used spruce candles, heard lots of horror stories about extract. 
2 oz for 60 min
1 oz for 30 min
Had the best luck with Cascades.
The M on my M, also has a bit of smoked malt.  Pretty good, one of my favs.



 

Pages: 1 2 3

Post Your Reply





Search Home Brewing Knowledge Base
Custom Search