Kitchen Chemistry

32

I was sitting on the couch this morning, staring at a little dwarf blue spruce in the yard and I was admiring its pretty little fresh spring growth tips.

And then I remembered learning that spruce tips are an excellent source of Vitamin C that First Nations would collect and brew into tea. During the Gold Rush, the miners that arrived in Alaska faced scurvy and some observant people noticed that the First Nations people didn’t have the same deficiency issues. When they learned to gather the spruce tips and extract the health benefits of them, they apparently decided that tea was not for their ilk…so they brewed it into beer.

I know this because I drank spruce tip beer in Skagway Alaska last year.

Was it excellent?

Meh….it was beer….it had a hint of forest to it, and it was not at all unpleasant.

Was it worth $20CAD after the exchange rate?

No.

But it stuck with me.

So today I was staring out at that little blue spruce and thought….I wonder if one could make a cocktail syrup or a bitters with those…

Answer?

Yes!

So out I went with my snips and harvested about a cup of new growth off the little tree and started a small batch of spruce tip bitters.

I blended two different recipes that I found online and it will take about a month to do its thing before it’s ready.

I’ll let you know how it is.

And now I am on a mission to go find another spruce tree (I’ll probably head up the mountain and see what I can find up along the power line below Grouse Mountain) and collect a bit more and try a cocktail syrup and see how yummy that might taste in an Old Fashioned or a Highlander.

I was also eyeballing the Western Hemlock tree at the end of the driveway which has a large branch low enough that I can get at all the little bright green tips and see what that tastes like.

At no time did I ever think I’d be using a coniferous tree in my yard to make something from the kitchen.