I am curious as to what exactly spruce tips are. Thinking about next year’s Christmas beer already. I have a blue spruce in the back yard…
Spruce tips are the very young first growths from the trees. They are very soft and sweet. They do not have much in the way of sprucey or piney flavor when they are very young.
Oh ok…so I assume my mature blue spruce will not help…
Actually it will work fine but you would need to harvest some of the new growth that emerges in the spring as they begin to grow.
I encourage you to try a spruce beer before you brew one. You might change your mind.
+1
I have tried beers with spruce tips. I think it can be successful as long as you keep it subtle
+10
I’ve only had two spruce beers that I liked. I had some of Shorts Brewing’s Imperial Spruce India Pilsner at this yr’s GABF and it was a really good beer. The other spruce beers I’ve had were just too much and I couldn’t drink more than a couple of ounces. Actually, Alaskan’s Winter beer is brewed w/ spruce and that’s not a bad beer.
As for brewing a spruce beer, not sure if I want 3-5 gallons of a spruce beer taking up one of my taps.
My goal isn’t necessarily to create a spruce tips beer. The plan is to create a complex, strong Christmas ale utilizing spices and possibly a small amount of spruce tips…
I think you should treat spruce tips like vermouth in a martini. Show them to the kettle then put them away.
don’t worry about all the spruce tip haters. I say go for it… next Christmas. This spring when your spruce starts to get those light green tips collect a couple quarts and freeze them.
I think Tom Schmidlin posted some good info on the relative merit of the varying kinds of spruce for this purpose.
Here:
http://www.homebrewersassociation.org/forum/index.php?topic=14089.msg179189#msg17918
I say go for it too, but seriously, taste the tips before you decide to use them or not. If you don’t like the flavor, don’t use them. You can try different kinds of trees, and even different trees of the same variety. They don’t all taste identical, and even trees growing right next to each other can taste different. If you find a good tree keep going back to it, each time you harvest the tips there will be twice as many on those same branches the next year.
For real? So you could theoretically make the tree bushier by harvesting the tips?
I just kegged my spruce ale. I used my standard pale ale grain bill and hopped with chinook and cascade. I added about 8 oz of spruce tips with 5 minutes to go in the boil. Tasting notes going into the keg was very citrusy flavor. I liked it and expect it to be good carbed up.
I harvested the spruce tips from the new blue spruce growth in the the spring. You want to get them when they are about the size of the end of you pinky or the size of the tip of a small paint brush. I shrink wrapped them and froze them until I brewed it about 6 weeks ago.
Yes, removing the tip causes the end to branch the next year. It will have the same affect as other trimming you do on the trees in your yard, so it can make it look bushier this way.
Thanks for the information. Let me know how it turns out in a couple of weeks. I was thinking of a similar hop combo with the spruce tips plus maybe some simcoe.
My spruce tree doesn’t seem to be in the best of health so I am not sure if there will be much new growth.
I thought about using Simcoe but opted out for whatever reason. Now that I think of it, I used all homegrown hops in it too. And it was Centennial instead of cascade. I don’t remember exactly but something like 18 grams of chinook at 60, 14 grams of each at 30 and 0 minutes. Those amounts ate round about. I don’t have my notes. My types recipe called for 1/2 oz chinook at 60 and half oz each at 30 and 0, but I opted to use my homegrowns at the last moment to keep the trend since the spruce was grown on peppery to. Harvesting the spruce tips isn’t the funnest thing. It takes a lot to get a 1/2 pound.
Just to say that I had one that was unlike others I have had, at Fort George in Astoria OR before the 2012 NHC. It had. Juicy citrus char actor with a piney/woody background. Not like chewing on a piece of pine branch like some beers - Shorts comes to mind.
A properly produced spruce has NO pine-sol character. Just the notes that Jeff mentions above.