Spruce beer

Spruce beer is a beverage flavored with the buds, needles, or essence of spruce trees. Spruce beer can refer to either alcoholic or non-alcoholic beverages.

A number of flavors are associated with spruce-flavored beverages, ranging from floral, citrusy, and fruity to cola-like flavors to resinous and piney. This diversity in flavor likely comes from the choice of spruce species, the season in which the needles are harvested, and the manner of preparation.

Using evergreen needles to create beverages originated with the Indigenous peoples of North America who used the drink as a cure for scurvy during the winter months when fresh fruits were not available. It may also have been brewed in Scandinavia prior to European contact with the Americas, but most French and British explorers were ignorant of its use as a treatment for scurvy when they arrived in North America. The First Nations people were probably first to brew it and it was used to prevent scurvy by Jacques Cartier and his explorers when they arrived in Stadacona in what is now Quebec in 1535.

The fresh shoots of many spruces and pines are a natural source of vitamin C. European sailors adopted the practice and spread it across the world.

In 1536, the French explorer Jacques Cartier, exploring the St. Lawrence River, used the local natives' knowledge to save his men who were dying of scurvy. He boiled the needles of a tree the St. Lawrence Iroquoians called the Aneda (probably Thuja occidentalis) to make a tea that was later shown to contain 50 mg of vitamin C per 100 grams. Such treatments were not available aboard ship, where the disease was most common. When Samuel de Champlain arrived 72 years later, he could not ask the locals which tree should be used, as the St. Lawrence Iroquoians had disappeared. This method of treating scurvy using evergreen-needle beverages was later picked up by the British Royal Navy, and spruce was regularly added to ship-brewed beer during eighteenth century explorations of the West Coast of North America and the wider Pacific, including New Zealand.
Jane Austen, who had two brothers in the Royal Navy, refers to spruce beer in Chapter 40 of Emma.

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