By Wes Porter ——Bio and Archives--November 29, 2019
Lifestyles | CFP Comments | Reader Friendly | Subscribe | Email Us
History tells us that Breton explorer Jacques Cartier saved his scurvy-plagued men with native-sourced spruce beer. Iced in at the mouth of the St. Charles River early in 1536, he brewed up a beverage rich in vitamin C. Only it wasn’t spruce beer. The local Iroquoians instructed him to use what they called Aneda, now believed to have been white cedar, Thuja occidentalis.
First Nations peoples did drink a non-alcoholic medicinal tea made from the tips of black spruce, Picea mariana, it being richer in vitamin C than cedars. So it was to various Picea species that French, British and Dutch colonial settlers turned when it came to a spruce brew-up – alcoholic or otherwise.
Swedish botanist Pehr Kalm recorded that spruce beer ‘is chiefly used by the French in Canada.’ Imported wine being prohibitively expensive, the habitants resorted the easily available brew. By 1752, a writer on Cape Breton Island was praising it as ‘la bière très bonne.’
About the same time it was welcomed aboard His Britannic Majesty’s ships for brewing anti-scurvy beer. Captain Cook took it on his famous voyages of exploration; famous also as he lost scarcely a man to the disease. British regiments serving in North America valued it for the same medicinal qualities. Made from red (P. rubens) or black spruce, alcoholic spruce beer was common in the colonial US and eastern Canada, apparently relying on the natural yeasts present on the sprigs. In Britain, it remained popular through the 19th century and, according to Larousse Gastronomique (1938), well into the next century in France..
Back in Quebec, the traditional bière d’épinette, the non-alcoholic carbonated drink or genuine alcoholic spruce beer remains favoured. According to Rachel Faber writing in Maclean’s it “tastes something like Sprite mixed with Christmas tree”
However, zythophiles can rejoice. Canadian lovers of beer may discover breweries from Halifax, Nova Scotia to Tofino, British Columbia offering spruce-flavoured, barley-based beers. Not the eastern spruce species though, but the magnificent western Sitka spruce, Picea sitchensis, that is favoured by brew masters today.
Modern marketing mavens have created their version the traditional French-Canadian bière d’épinette. Sobey’s ‘Compliments’ in-house brand of Spruce Beer contains, their website assures us: ‘carbonated water, sugar/glucose-fructose, citric acid, potassium benzoate, natural and artificial flavour, acacia gum, sucrose acetate isobutyrate, brominated soybean oil, phosphoric acid.’ What would the Iroquoians have done?
Support Canada Free Press
View Comments
Wes Porter is a horticultural consultant and writer based in Toronto. Wes has over 40 years of experience in both temperate and tropical horticulture from three continents.