Brewing with spruce tips is not new: trees have a long, entangled history with beer. Leaves, needles, bark, and roots have all been added to the boil kettle. Branches and needles have been used in the mash tun for filtering. Trunks have been hollowed out for lautering. And wood has been used for centuries to build mash tuns, fermentors, and barrels for brewing, aging, and shipping ales.

In the Pacific Northwest, we’re blessed with an abundance of evergreen trees. Pine and spruce needles are high in vitamin C, and the young spring growth has a decidedly citrusy flavor. As a result, the needles are particularly well-suited to brewing. Many varieties of spruce and pine can be used to similar effect, but this article is going to focus specifically on Sitka spruce tips.

The Sitka spruce, Picea sitchensis, is native to the Pacific coast. Any part of the tree could be used in beer, but the bright green new growth found on the tips of the branches in the spring provides the best effect. You can also use the older, darker needles, but they will have a much more bitter, piney flavor than the fresh tips.

Foraging Sitka Spruce

If you live along the Pacific coast between Northern California and Alaska, then you can forage for Sitka spruce tips in the spring to use in your beer. The Sitka spruce is the largest spruce and one of the largest species of conifer, capable of growing over 300 feet tall. The bark is thin and flakes off in scales. The needles are blue-green with lighter undersides, arranged spirally on the branches. They are four-sided, so you can roll them between two fingers.

In the spring, look for when the fresh tips have opened up from the buds and begun to expand, but are still bright green compared to the older needles, soft to the touch, and easy to chew. They should pop off the branch fairly easily right at the base of the bud. Try eating some raw!

You can use the collected tips right away, or you can bag them up and freeze them like hops. I like to vacuum seal mine to keep them fresh longer.

Brewing with Sitka Spruce

You can brew with spruce tips in the boil or steeped after the boil, just like hops. The fresh spring growth will give your beer a citrusy, vitamin C character from the ascorbic acid, with notes of resin and pine. In order to preserve the bright flavor and essential oils, boil for the fresh tips for 15 minutes or less. Longer boil times will give a deeper flavor with more resiny, piney flavor coming through and more bitterness.

Maximum Usage Rates

For a very strong spruce character:

• 1.6 ounces per gallon (8 ounces per 5 gallons)
• 12 grams per liter (228 grams per 19 liters)
• 49.6 ounces per barrel

For a subtler, more balanced flavor, you can cut those numbers in half.

I have used anywhere from 0.2 ounces per gallon to augment a Christmas Ale up to 1 ounce per gallon alongside hops in a spruce-forward Cascadian Dark Ale, all to great effect.