Rewarding the Crow with Spruce Tips

When Spring rolls around in Nova Scotia, it’s time to harvest spruce tips. Experts suggest that tips from young trees, around a decade old, have the best flavour and you don’t need a ladder to pick them. With spruce trees growing around their property, it was natural that Jill Linquist and Chris Pruski at Nova Scotia’s Raging Crow Distillery would harvest the tips for the distillery’s Spruce Tip Gin.

Although they risk frostbitten fingers, the two hand pick the spruce tips then macerate them in the alcohol along with juniper, lemon peel and coriander yielding a spirit of golden hue. The process wasn’t an easy one to perfect. They soon learned it takes a delicate, fully thawed hand to ensure that sap from the spruce tips doesn’t gum it up. “We have worked through that issue, so there is very little loss now,” says Linquist.  “We harvested an abundance of spruce tips last Spring and have discovered that they freeze very well. So we can produce 55-litre batches of this gin throughout the year.”

Raging Crow’s Spruce Tip Gin paints its flavours in broad brush strokes, with its contemporary style crossing over into the sweetness of an Old Tom. A pinch of sugar contributes additional balance and mouthfeel to the gin as the freshness of the spruce tips shines brightly. Lush evergreen notes fill the glass with a carefully controlled pine bite. So, rather than feeling like you’re chewing a pine cone, the subtle herbaceous spiciness is boosted by tantalizing citrus tones, making it ideal for a classic Negroni, Tom Collins or neat on a chunk of ice.

In the very competitive contemporary gin category at the 2020 Canadian Artisanal Spirits Awards, Spruce Tip Gin came home with a silver medal proving there might be another reason for harvesting those younger tips. The older spruce is needed to build a trophy cabinet.