Colonial Army Rations: Beer Every Day! - Spruce Beer In Early America

welcome to 18th century cooking I'm your host John Townsend today we're going to be looking at a fascinating topic spruce beer thanks for joining us as we savor the flavors in the aromas of the 18th century drew Speier has this incredibly rich history it's not only yummy but it's important as a health property and it's so important that it's part of the military rations let me read to you a piece from 1775 General Orders and here's Congress and they're talking about rations for soldiers each the following ration of provisions is allowed by Continental Congress to each soldier a pound of fresh beef a pound of bread three pints of peas that's per week not per day a pint of milk per day per man if it's available a half pint of rice per man per week and here's the good one a quart of spruce beer per man per day or we'll get to this later on nine gallons of molasses per company of a hundred men per week so there it is showing up right there in the military rations in 1775 this is drank by just regular people its soldiers and sailors people in fortifications it's incredibly important in the 18th century so what exactly is spruce beer it's technically not truly a beer by a modern sense but it's made in very similar way it's it's also very very similar to the ginger beer that we've made in the past if you've seen that episode but the major sort of flavoring ingredient and the major portion of its medicinal properties come from spruce and the Spruce that's mainly used in the 18th century is black spruce that's the Spruce everybody wants but that really only grows in the very very northern part of North America so you know maybe Massachusetts and north to serve that half half way in Michigan and north of that of course all over Canada you have black spruce sometimes people use white spruce in the time period and if you're down south say in South Carolina you would use pine doesn't make nearly as good a spruce beer but some people did make it up and spruce beer has this has this history that goes all the way back say into the 17th century Native Americans were helping out those in Canada that were sick with scurvy they made a spruce drink not really a beer but a drink and that cured them they the the European sort of converted that and said let's make beer out of it instead well it turns out that when you boil spruce you get rid of all the wonderful vitamin C that was really good for it but people still considered it a health drink so we need to have the ingredient of spruce in our spruce beer how are we gonna make that that's what we're gonna do we need to collect up some spruce cuttings let's go out and get some spruce cuttings we want some nice soft spruce trees if we can get it and this is the perfect time of year early summer we got some new growth here this nice green part soft tender it's got a lot of good flavor to it if it's wintertime and you've only got the older growth that's what they did if they needed spruce and they needed that vitamin C even in the winter you could still go to your your a spruce tree it's still green you can get some cuttings from that we've got our cuttings and I kind of chopped them down a little bit and now we just toss them into some boiling water and and really we just need we're just gonna cover them up with as much water as possible and the recipes all sort of agree that we boil this for an hour two hours until the bark starts to peel off of the stick the problem with that is is really the the the vitamin C that's built in to spruce us they're really the good part the healing part it gets destroyed by this boiling process so they did this in the 18th century they didn't know that that was what was happening there is a caveat here that I also want to give and that is we have to be careful about what we're cutting we can't just go out into you know into the yard or into the forest and cut any old willy-nilly evergreen because there are some evergreens that are poisonous the wonderful thing about a spruce tree is the whole thing is basically edible it's really weird you can get you know peel off the inner bark raw and eat it you can eat the nettles you can eat the sticks you can eat everything on a spruce tree it's actually good for you right off the tree but if you get something like a Juniper or some kinds of cedar they're poisonous so know your tree before you go cutting you can boil this for approximately an hour now that this is done all we have to do is strain the liquid out and leave the pine needles behind so one of the very very interesting things about this is you would think it would have this super piney smell but actually it has this wonderful sort of food smell to it it really really smells good so while we can make our own spruce essence and many recipes talk about making process ins most of the recipes actually refers straight to spruce essence as a product that you could buy and and they were making spruce essence and selling it all over most of the recipes the vast majority actually say just use spruce essence and today we can still buy spruce essence you can find it at a brewing supply store that's close to you or you can find it on Amazon so you can make your own spruce beer you're actually very easily especially if you just want to buy this Bruce essence you know it's it's actually got some of the best flavour compared to maybe using a blue spruce which isn't as good if you've got access to black spruce you might want to make your own but this is actually gonna work really good and that's what we're gonna use today now that we talked about spruce essence let's talk about the other ingredients and in fact let's talk about the recipe that we're gonna be using today we could use Amelia Simmons's recipe from 1796 excellent recipe in the very back of this cookbook this cookbook is available on our website but today I'm gonna be using a very very simple recipe from 1788 very similar time period this is Philadelphia 1788 now this one's not called spruce beer but you'll see here they call it maple beer to every four gallons of water while boiling add a quart of maple molasses when the liquor is cooled to blood heat put in as much yeast as it's necessary to foment it I like that fomented malt or bran may be added to this beer when agreeable if a tablespoon of the essence of spruce is added to the above quantities of water and molasses it makes a most delicious and wholesome drink so this is pretty simple right it's only got a very very few ingredients we've got water here we nice clear good soft water if we can get it we need our sugar which is in this case maple molasses or you know it is maple syrup we need some essence of spruce we've already created that or even more likely we bought it it's that's the good stuff that it really tastes good and we need some yeast we need some ale yeast or any kind of brewing yeast is gonna work if you don't have anything else and you want to make this right away you can use bread yeast but if you're gonna be ordering your spruce essence order some ale yeast at the same time it's not very expensive now most recipes in the 18th century actually call for just straight-up molasses and what they probably mean is regular cane molasses dark you know molasses that's a byproduct of making sugar taste great but in this red in this kind of recipe it really brings too much flavor to it it overpowers the Spruce we don't want that to happen so I really recommend this particular recipe that uses maple syrup if you don't want to use maple syrup you can also use cane syrup that's available in the store that's gonna give you the most spruce flavor even this maple might bring in a little bit more flavor than you want but I think it's a perfect mix maple and spruce together so I really recommend this one you can try it with the with the regular molasses hey just I think it just way overpowers it though so let's get started making this recipe we've got our water I've already got it warmed up a little bit we're gonna put this over the fire in this case and we want to get it heated up we're gonna be using this 2 gallons as our particular recipe and most of the recipes have this same sort of ratio of sugar to water so it's about 8 to 1 so for 2 gallons of water we have a quart of maple syrup I'm just gonna go ahead and pour our quart right in and then our next ingredient is our essence of spruce and we're gonna use about oh let's say 2 ounces of spruce essence here now this we're going to bring this up to a boil many of the 18th century recipe would actually have us boil this for a long time some of them have the water to be boiled until it's half as much which is crazy they did that on purpose they thought in the 18th century that the effervescence that comes from a brewed beer or other kind of brewing things they they thought that those bubbles actually came from the boiling of this wort but but we know today that of course all that effervescence is because of the yeast so we know that the only point of really getting this to boil is basically to sterilize the batch here we want to kill everything off so we're gonna bring this up to a boil and then immediately as soon as it's boiling just for a minute or so we're actually gonna let it cool off remember that substitution in the the soldiers rations where it said they either got a gallon of spruce beer or they got molasses as a substitute they got molasses as a substitute so they could make their own spruce beer that's the one component that it would be the most difficult to come up with so that's why the substitute ration for spruce beer is molasses so the soldiers could make their own we've got our mixture in our fermenting vessel and now it's ready for the next step if this is cooled down to blood temperature and cooler we want to be able to put our finger in it and say no heat there right we want it to be below blood temperature now we can pitch our yeast and we've got our ale yeast this is the kind of yeast that the brewer would take off a batch of beer and he'd use it for the next batch that's exactly what we're using here so we've got some yeast and we're gonna just pour that in maybe about a pint and that's good for our two gallons if you're using a modern yeast that comes in a packet usually those are meant for five gallon batches so you'd use about a half a batch and those yeast have those these packets have very particular directions so follow the directions on the packet for the temperature and exactly how you put it in there because each one's a little bit different this is ready it's going to start fermenting right away and it will ferment for the next couple of days but for right now we're just going to cover this up if you're using a modern equipment you know you'd be using special you know things that keep the air out but in the 18th century they didn't do that we're just gonna put a nice lid on here keep the dust out and it's gonna start percolating away so this has been working a couple of days now let's take a look at it and it looks really good it's it's been fermenting there's still a few bubbles coming on this but it's mostly fermented away now we can use it we could drink it right now perfectly good we can also bottle this up and they would have they had directions for that so we're just gonna I basically ladle this off and put it right into some stoneware bottles you might use a glass bottle for this and we bought we can bottle this for short periods of time sometimes they say this will last a while but I would again recommend this to be used fairly rapidly but if we bottle it we can get some effervescence from it that's another thing to remember that this is still going to ferment a little bit it's going to pressurize that bottle and just like the ginger beer if you have too much sugar and it's still fermenting a lot in the bottle it might explode or it might build up so much pressure that it's hard to uncork and you'll get you know it basically all of it comes out instead of instead of being able to drink it so you don't want to you want this to bottle up to get a little bit of carbonation not too much or it's very very difficult to to uncork well we've got a great look to it it's a it's got a wonderful smell to it not like pine-sol that you might worry about it's like I've always got spruce it's got pine in it's just not like that at all I'm really interested to see how this particular batch turned out because each one sort of has its own thing going on so let's give it a try we're still a little bit of carbonation that's good it hasn't I haven't left this carbonate a long time we've got a several different flavors coming in here we've got certainly the the Spruce and that kind of comes in in the smell but the maple syrup flavor is still there and that is really good so you're mixing this wonderful smooth as spray spruce with the maple syrup and a little bit of yeast but not in a bad way at all mmm very refreshing and make a great summertime drink boy that is a very unique but very good flavor if you get a chance this one's this one's one to try out I really recommend this one it's simple to do a lot of fun you know if you loved this video and you want more make sure to subscribe and if you'd like a similar episode where we do ginger beer check out this one

Channel: Townsends

Views: 1,851,557

Keywords: townsends, jas townsend and son, reenacting, history, 18th century, 19th century, jon townsend, 18th century cooking, beer, military ration, beer ration, spruce beer, making beer, brewing beer, military beer, molasses, spruce, pine tree, army ration, naval ration, 18 century cooking, colonial cooking, historical cooking, townsend's bread, townsend's pemmican, jas townsend and son scotch eggs, townsends food, townsend's beer

Id: RgLC_DRd2cg

Length: 14min 59sec (899 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 10 2019

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god i wanna make this now