Next time you’re living it up at a salmon bake, give a thought to the hardships of the early explorers. By the time sailors got to Alaska, a couple of years’ sailing time from Europe, all they wanted was decent food. They’d been eating hardtack: biscuits made of pea flour, wheat and bone dust, since they’d left home. One naturalist reported seeing “hundreds nay thousands” of insects shaken out of a single biscuit. If that wasn’t bad enough, the complete lack of fresh fruit on ships also meant that the sailors were risking scurvy, a vitamin C deficiency that can make your bones ache and your teeth fall out, and can even kill you.
Luckily, Captain George Vancouver and his men found a simple solution along the Inside Passage: beer made from the tips of spruce buds. It not only goes down smoothly, it’s rich in vitamins, and for people as afraid of drinking water as most 18th-century sailors were, it was the perfect beverage. As a bonus, a half-gallon ration was enough to blur the way the hardtack crawled across the table.
There are quite a few microbreweries in Alaska now that will sell you spruce-tip beer, but if you’re the adventurous sort, here’s how to make the stuff yourself:
Boil 10 gallons (45.5 liters) of water, six pounds (2.7 kilograms) of molasses, and three ounces (85 grams) of ginger for three hours; add two pounds (.9 kilograms) of spruce tips for five minutes in the boil. Strain, add milk yeast, wait two days for fermentation.
Then pour a stein, put your feet up, and consider yourself an authentic researcher into the history of Alaskan travel. You might want to skip the hardtack, though.