Now you may or may not depending on when you started reading the blog, me talking about all those amazing things you can do with fresh young spruce tips, I found a note book from my time when I worked at The Office in yellowknife (which has no website that I could find but if you ever get the chance to eat there, go! the food is amazing, and they try and have alot of northern foods or northern flare) and found a couple more recipes that we used the tips in, so watch for versions of those coming soon..

But don’t think that you can’t use the older spruce needles at certain times or in certain ways, I think its most common to find references of using the older needles in terms of the wilderness guides in regards to making Spruce Tea

But I want to make a nice Spruce Beer which is not really going to a Beer, as I don’t drink beer but it will in fact be more like a ginger or root beer, and here is the basic recipe I will be using..  I want this lovely beer to use in two recipes I want to make later this week, both northern inspired, if you can buy a good spruce beer at the local beer store it will be workable between the two..

So the first thing I did was go collect the late fall spruce needles, (remember to take from different places, moving from tree to tree and that even at this time of the year, the younger tree’s will have longer, softer brighter needles then the older tree’s or older needles will be). Now I have read where it says to just put them in like that, please don’t, take the time to stripe or cut off the needles, if you put in the little branches, you will get a very ughhh undertaste and bitterness that is NOT going to rock your taste buds..

When you are done, you should have a cup of these lovely’s, its possable that you might like it stronger but give it a try with this amount, you can always add more later.. I went with a cup of cut cleaned needles to four cups of water, at a slow simmer for a full half hour before letting them sit for another half hour to cool before straining and measuring out what I was left with..

does that not look so much like rosemary? Until they taste it, it can fool folks..  It will be ready in a couple days and at that point I will be able to make the rest of the planned meal, which will use a number of my homemade different spruce tip or needle recipes

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