Drinking a Christmas tree
If you live in Montreal and haven’t tried one of Quebec’s spruce beers, what are you waiting for? Many folks enjoy the smell of coniferous trees. Do you really want to go to your grave without trying to drink that smell in a beverage, at least once? Ingesting spruce in one form or another has been part of the region’s history since long before Quebec became a province. More on the stories later; let’s first take a look at what’s on offer for spruce beer in Quebec today.
What exactly are we talking about? Most commonly, spruce beer in Quebec is found as a sweet carbonated non-alcoholic beverage with natural flavoring obtained from spruce trees. The balance of the coniferous ingredient against the drink’s sugar content is a major characteristic that differentiates one bière d’épinette from another. Yet it can be difficult to judge the subtleties of spruce beers against one another because the spruce can be such a strong, dominant flavor.
Spruce beer in Quebec: bottle to bottle
The first stop was Atwater Market’s Les Douceurs du Marché, which sells two competing spruce beers. Both based in Montreal, Sodas Marco is near Little Italy, and Henri Sodas near Parc La Fontaine. In an unofficial taste test we couldn’t decide on a winner, but they both were fun to drink. They’re clearly different, even in color. Spruce beer in Quebec does not lack variety. Fortunately, you’ll have to try a few brands to find your preference. Unfortunately, you’re not likely to find them at your corner dépanneur, and they’ll probably never get that popular. Sure, they’re more expensive than mass-produced sodas, but that’s okay since these are best as a treat; downing multiple sugary sodas daily doesn’t lead to positive outcomes.
The Henri Sodas website states that their bière d’épinette is made with organic cane sugar and organic black spruce essence. Sodas Marco kindly replied to our email to inform us that theirs is made with carbonated water, yeast, cane sugar and natural spruce essence. As noted in La Presse, the presence of Marco’s spruce beer in Quebec since 1956 is why it evokes childhood memories for some, especially because the label now displays the woman who originally adorned the bottles back then.
Henri Sodas spruce beer on the left, Sodas Marco on the right. Perhaps the former is less filtered or uses a different ratio of spruce, leaving behind some naturally-occurring phenolic compounds that yield this color.
Bière d’épinette Émile
You have two choices of spruce beer at Paul Patates, a casse-croûte (snack bar) located in the Pointe-Saint-Charles neighborhood of Montreal. La Émile is available pour emporter in a heavy brown bottle strong enough to withstand the pressure built up during fermentation. La Bertrand contains even more yeast than La Émile, and is a drop less sweet. To avoid mishandling by vendors and consumers that could lead to an exploding bottle, La Bertrand is served on the spot. La Émile can be stored in the bottle for up to 4 months.
Paul Patates spruce beers are brewed in-house using only water, sugar, yeast and spruce oil. As noted in Maclean’s several years ago, the original recipe comes from a restaurant that opened towards the end of the 19th century: Émile Bertrand. According to a BBC travel article from December 2018, the Paul Patates brewmaster credits Montreal water and oil extracted from black spruce for the great taste of his sodas. See how La Émile [below] is more translucent than the transparent spruce beers mentioned at the top of this post, perhaps due to yeast content.
La P’tite (bière d’épinette)
Did we save the best for last? Perhaps. La P’tite is a small Montreal outfit that brews two spruce beers and then one from fir trees. Like the other beverages mentioned in this post, La P’tite also uses only 4 ingredients: water, fresh conifer branches, cane sugar (in this brand, organic), and yeast. According to a 2019 post in Fortune, brewer Jean-François Laroche frequently heads up north to harvest fresh branches, and “Only 10 tips are taken per tree, to ensure no damage is done and allow for healthy regrowth”.
The honesty on their website is appreciated: “Malheureusement, nul ne sait aujourd’hui de quel arbre il s’agissait.” Yes, Laroche admits that we don’t actually know which conifer was famously used by Jacques Cartier. Read on for the history of spruce beer in Quebec… or whatever tree it was…
Based on anecdotes and the Nutrition Facts panel, La P’tite seems to have significantly less sugar than other spruce beers in Quebec — and it still tastes great!
The History of Spruce Beer in Quebec
Spruce beer in Quebec is sometimes attributed to a time even before the region went by the name of New France. Jacques Cartier was a French-Breton maritime explorer who claimed the “New World” by planting a cross inscribed with Vive le Roi de France at present-day Gaspé Bay. During his second voyage here (1535–36), the crew of the ships became afflicted with scurvy during a winter in the Stadacona [Quebec City] area of the St. Lawrence River. Many of them died, but then Cartier learned of a coniferous decoction from Don Agaya and Taignoagny, two natives who became “Canada’s first interpreters”.†
Despite the prominence of Cartier’s story in Canadian medical history, the exact conifer used in this expedition-saving treatment remains debated. Spellings of the Iroquois name vary: ameda, anneda, annedda or hanneda. A scientific approach narrows it down to 11 trees, of which 8 species are more likely to be the one from Cartier’s account. While red or black spruce were the main sources for the manufacture of spruce beer in centuries that followed, “the white cedar is the best candidate for Cartier’s anneda”, concludes C Stuart Houston1 in a thoughtful analysis of the candidate trees. That’s white cedar, not white spruce.
Moreover, the life-saving drink in Cartier lore was more of a conifer tea than a conifer “beer”. If it had been a fermented spruce beer, his crew may very well have died from scurvy, because as revealed in a modern experiment, the ascorbate was destroyed in spruce beer with fermentation:2
Revelations about the origin story of spruce beer needn’t shatter this crafted piece of Quebec heritage, however. The Quebecois still have centuries of spruce beer consumption to take pride in. Historian Benjamin Suite cites an apothecary in Quebec City making spruce beer as early as 1617. Swedish traveller Pehr Kalm noted upon his visit to New France in 1749 that spruce beer was quite popular.3 (And not only in Quebec: visitors to Newfoundland in the second half of the 18th century described it as the “common liquor of the country” and “the principal beverage of the people”.)4
The variety of spruce-laden beverages consumed in the earlier histories of the Quebec and Newfoundland regions reveal that “spruce beer” had no clearly defined recipe beyond the coniferous ingredient. Generally, to make it you’d use the water filtered from boiled spruce branches and add ingredients such as yeast, wheat, and molasses or syrup. This was the standard process up until the 1770s when surgeon Henry Taylor in Quebec City devised “the method to extract the essence of spruce”, subsequently setting up a distillery for spruce oil along Boulevard Champlain. Most of the distillery’s spruce essence was exported to England, the United States and Jamaica, yet plenty stayed here for beer. Quebec brewer William George bought enough between March 1784 and June 1785 to make over 11,000 gallons of double spruce beer.5
† Let’s not sugar-coat the account: Cartier kidnapped Don Agaya and Taignoagny (sons of the Iroquois chief of Stadacona) during his first journey to New France, had them learn some French in France, and brought them back from France as interpreters for the second voyage.6
“Cartier’s Crew Gathering the Tree Annedda” by Hal Ross Perrigard (1891-1960)
C’est pas de la p’tite bière!
«C’est pas de la p’tite bière!» is a Québécois expression. “It’s not small beer” is used to describe an object of superior quality, which suggests that “small beer” is a rather belittling term given to folk beverages like spruce beer. Why? Small beers were easy to make or cheap to purchase, so were associated with poverty. Small beers were low in alcohol content, so were associated with temperance. The last decades of the 1800s saw a decline in the popularity of spruce beer thanks to the rise of tea, inconsistent efficacy as an antiscorbutic, and its association with the lower classes.
Now, with a renewed interest in traditional or artisanal foods and beverages, perhaps we can say that spruce beer in Quebec is making a comeback. It may be a small beer — but at the same time, C’est pas de la p’tite bière!
References
- Houston, C.S. (1990). ‘Scurvy and Canadian Exploration’. Canadian Bulletin of Medical History VII, 161–67.
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Hughes, R.E. (October 1975). ‘James Lind and the cure of scurvy: an experimental approach‘. Med Hist, 19(4): 342–351.
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Germain, R. (1992). « Les p’tites bières ». Cap-aux-Diamants, (28), 36–39.
- Crellin, John K. (1966). ‘Spruce Beer and Its Inconsistent Reputation‘. A Social History of Medicines in the Twentieth Century, 37–40.
- Lessard, R. (1987). « Le secret de la bière d’épinette ». Cap-aux-Diamants, 2(4), 45–45.
- Delisle, Jean (1997). ‘The Canadian Tradition‘. The Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Studies, 356–365. Edited by Mona Baker, assisted by Kirsten Malmkjaer.