Go looking for birch beer these days and you’ll find sugary sweet soda with just a few drops of birch oil added. That wasn’t always the case, and real birch beer, alcoholic birch beer, has been brewed for 100’s of years. Birch beer, birch wine and birch mead were made just about anywhere in the world birch trees grow.
Birch sap runs later in the spring than maple when the temperatures are consistently above freezing. With all that warmth, it’s hard to keep birch sap from fermenting, so if you’re tapping birch trees, you might as well go with it.
The Englishmake a birch beer with birch sap and sugar, and the Russians make a type of quick mead, calledmedovukha, from birch sap and honey. But why add other sugars?
Birch syrup is sweet and tasty, and birch sap is plentiful. Why not make a pure birch beer, more like a birch wine almost, with just concentrated birch sap?
The main reason most birch beers were made with birch sap and sugar is energy cost. Sacred Healing and Herbal Beers notes,“Most traditional recipes used sugar as an additive because of the labor involved in making birch sap sweet enough to provide enough sugar for fermentation by itself.”
A full gallon of birch sap boils down to roughly 1 ounce of birch syrup, and it’d take roughly 1 quart (32 ounces) of birch syrup to make a gallon of birch beer.
Finished birch syrup. This batch started at 6 gallons…and it boiled down to about 6 ounces (3/4 cup).
Concentrating 32 gallons of birch sap down to a single gallon for birch beer takes time and fuel. Nonetheless, I decided to give it a try.
Instead of making a full gallon, I’m going to make just a quart of wine using a mason jar fermentation kit. A quart of wine only needs about a cup of birch syrup, which I’ve made from 8 gallons of birch sap.
Since birch sap can be hard to come by, I’m hoping that this recipe will be easier to replicate at home with justbirch syrup, water and yeast. If you’d like to try using birch sap, you can actually buy it bottled online. It’s been drunk as a health tonic in eastern Europe for generations, and it’s now being marketed as a new age superfood, like the next coconut water.
When I make small batch meads, I use between 2/3 of a cup and 1 whole cup of honey for a quart of mead, so likely this birch beer will be on the sweeter side with a full cup of birch syrup. Feel free to adjust down to as little as 2/3 of a cup of birch syrup for a one-quart batch.
While maple syrup has glucose as the main sugar, birch trees produce fructose like the fruit sugars in wine and cider. Older recipes, with added sugar, say that the sap ferments quickly and violently. I’d imagine then that birch sap has the necessaryminerals and nutrients for supporting yeast, but I found that it fermented quite slowly on its own.
I filled a quart mason jar, then added a small amount of wine yeast and capped the jar with a mason jar fermentation kit.
Since it’s only a very small batch, it’s easier to skip the siphon process and wine bottles altogether, and just carefully pour the batch off, leaving behind the sediment. Then bottle in a flip-top Grolsch bottle.
This small batch of birch beer uses just birch syrup, water and yeast to create a wild foraged ale with a lot of birch flavor.
Ingredients
- 1 cup birch syrup
- 3 1/2 cups water
- 1/4 packet wine yeast
Instructions
- Add the birch syrup to the bottom of a quart mason jar. Bring the water to a boil and pour it over the birch syrup. Stir to dissolve.
- Pitch 1/4 packet of wine yeast into a few tablespoons of water and allow the yeast to dissolve.
- Allow the birch syrup mixture to come to room temperature, and then pitch the yeast (add it in).
- Cap with a mason jar fermentation kit, and allow the mixture to ferment at room temperature for a few weeks until visible fermentation has stopped. If you're using white sugar and birch sap, it may be done in less than a week.
- Carefully pour the birch beer off into another container, leaving any yeasty sediment behind in the mason jar. Bottle in a simple flip-top Grolsch bottle and allow it to age for at least a few days, but preferably 2 weeks, before drinking.
Nutrition Information:
Serving Size:
1 grams
Amount Per Serving:Unsaturated Fat: 0g
If you’re looking for traditional recipes, with added sugar, here are a few to try. The oldest recipe I can find for birch beer comes from Vinetum Britannicum, a brewing text from 1676:
“To every Gallon {of birch sap} whereof, add a pound of refined Sugar, and boil it about a quarter or half an hour; then set it to cool, and add a very little Yeast to it, and it will ferment, and thereby purge itself from that little dross the Liquor and Sugar can yield: then put it in a Barrel, and add thereto a small proportion of Cinnamon and Mace bruised, about half an ounce of both to ten Gallons; then stop it very close, and about a month after bottle it; and in a few days you will have a most delicate brisk Wine of a flavor like unto Rhenish. Its Spirits are so volatile, that they are apt to break the bottles, unless placed in a Refrigeratory, and when poured out, it gives a white head in the Glass. This Liquor is not of long duration, unless preserved very cool. Ale brewed of this Juice or Sap, is esteem’d very wholesome.”
Another recipe I found quoted in Sacred and Herbal Healing Beers. The notes say that it originally comes from Martha Washington’s Book of Cookery, from the revolutionary war era.
The author says he found it transcribed in A Sip Through Time, which is a catalog of historical brewing recipes. So this recipe is coming 3rd or 4th hand.
Keep in mind that modern “powdered sugar” has corn starch added as an anti-caking agent, so you’d be better off just using a fine sugar like caster sugar. In context though, it’s likely by powdered sugar she just means modern white granular sugar. Another thing to note, as she says that this is a “cure for the gravel,” that’s referring to kidney stones, and birch sap is still used as a traditional treatment for kidney stones.
“First make an incission & an hole through ye bark of one of ye largest birch tree bows, & put a quill therein, & quickly you shall perceive ye juice to distill. You may make incission into several bowes at once, which water ye receive into whatever vessill you pleas. It will continew running 9 or 10 days, & if yr tree be large, it will afford you gallons. Boyle it will, as you doe beer, but first put to every gallon, one pound of white pwdered sugar. When it is well boyled, take it of the fire, and put in a gilefate with yeast, as yu doe to ale or beere, & it will worke in the same mannor. After 4 or 5 days, bottle it up in the thickest bottles you can get, for fear of bursting. & then at 8 or 9 weeks end, you may drink it, but it is better if you keep it older. This drink is very pleasant and allsoe physicall, first for procuring an appetite, & allsoe it is an antydote against gravell and the stone. This liquor must be procurd & make up in March, which is ye onely time, and not at the later end of march neyther, for then the trees will not run soe well & freely as at ye beginning of the moneth.”
If you’re interested in traditional or historical brewing recipes, most of which involve wild plants and herbs, I’d strongly recommendthe bookSacred and Herbal Healing Beers. The herbal academy also has a very comprehensive course on herbal and medicinal fermentation, if you’re more of a course learner.
