Spruce Tea Mead

This is my latest experiment. For those who don't watch Man vs Wild, spruce tea is made by simply boiling the needles of an evergreen in water. You can use nearly any evergreen for this as long as they have rounded needles, many green shrubs will have flat or v-shaped needles. For my tea I use the big pine in my friends backyard. Spruce tea is packed with vitamin c, and is the only readily available source in the Northeast year round.

I like to use the smaller, newer growth on the tree, but anything with needles on it will do. You don't want a lot of wood in the boil but the smaller twigs towards the end are fine. I have found if you just throw the whole branch in it tastes just as good, but your pot gets very sappy.  Trim down your branches to remove as much wood as possible and pack it pretty tightly on a large pot. Fill with water until all the needles are covered and boil about twenty minutes. Strain through a coffee filter and enjoy straight or with a little honey or sugar.

For this mead recipe I'm making a couple of small half gallon batches. If you don't have a hydrometer* you can get pretty close to ten percent alcohol potential by following my ratio in the recipe. It should be noted that sugar content in honey can vary from brand to brand, but this should get you pretty close. For a ten percent mead, two pounds of sugar makes about a half gallon. So to make things a little easier I'm fermenting in half gallon beer growlers.

Clean your growlers thoroughly, but try not to use dish soap. I prefer vinegar with a bit of lemon. If you brew a lot use whatever sanitizer you prefer. Starsan has worked well for me in the past as it doubles as a yeast nutrient. you can get it online or at any brewing supply store. For this experiment I wanted to go all natural, so I'm using my hot spruce tea to sanitize my growler.

Put about two pounds of honey in the cleaned and rinsed growler. If you're quick enough after brewing the tea you can do it straight away after its made, otherwise bring the filtered tea back up to a boil. While its heating up, run the growler under hot water. This will heat up the glass so it doesn't crack when you add the near boiling tea. Fill the growler to about three inches from the top with the hot tea and loosely cover it with tin foil. The tea in the growler is in excess of two hundred degrees, this will pasteurize the contents in a few minutes. Let the mixture sit until it has reached room temperature.

This recipe is made for a dry ale yeast, but there are many options out there, if you want to up the alcohol content you can use a wine of champagne yeast. My next batch I wanna try to use my sourdough bread yeast and see how it does. You can get the Nottingham ale yeast I used in this on Amazon for about two dollars. Once your brew has reached room temp, add about a teaspoon of dry yeast to the brew. Sanitize a piece of tin foil and cover the top. You can't use the regular cap as the CO2 created by the yeast would cause the bottle to explode. You can use all the fancy corks and bubblers used in wine and beer making, but I have found that foil works fine. Honey is a very tough sugar to ferment, and many wild yeasts and molds don't do very well at it. So theres a very slim chance of contamination. Cover the bottle with a dish towel to keep light out.



Every few days remove the towel and shine a flashlight through the bottle, you should see bubbles floating to the top. Agitate the mix every few days, at least once a week. After a month of so, you should see the bubbles begin to slow. Once this happens, pour off a bit and see how it tastes. By this point the yeast is so well established, it's tough to contaminate it. The longer it ferments, the dryer and more alcoholic it will be. Depending on alcohol content and yeast used, the process can take up to six months. Once it reaches the flavor you want, place it in the fridge overnight. This is called racking, the low temp makes the yeast hibernate, and they settle on the bottom. When the mead looks clear, slowly pour it off into another bottle leaving the yeast at the bottom of the old bottle and refrigerate it. Continue this process until there in no yeast at the bottom. The more thorough you are at this process, the less likely it is that the yeast will reactivate when not refrigerated. Mead can be very good as soon as its done, but aging it at least a few weeks is a good idea. When it's done, serve chilled in a white wine glass. Or if you wanna be really authentic, room temp out of a drinking horn.