Sooner or later in your brewing life you get to a point where you just get an urge to be purely creative. For some, that’s sooner. For me, it was later (about three years in…what can I say, I’m not especially creative). It came in the form of a Yankee Candle.
Barbara and I were shopping at the largest mall in the United States (that’s the King of Prussia Mall, not the Mall of America – fight me), and it was fall, and the holiday season candles had just been released. I was sniffing away, and came across one that made me think, “wow, that’d be a great beer” – I turned the label and read “spruce.”
I’d heard of spruce beers, but never made one, and between the spruce candle and the whiff of ash in the candle-shop air, I thought I’d brew up a Colonial-era-inspired Stock Ale with spruce tips. I imagined I was memorializing the soldiers who’d camped just down the road at Valley Forge. I brewed my first version…and it was awful.