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Colonial Army Rations: Beer Every Day! – Spruce Beer In Early America

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Turns out the Continental Army’s daily ration sheet had a line item that would make a modern quartermaster raise an eyebrow: one quart of beer, per man, per day.

In 1775, the Continental Congress wrote spruce beer directly into the standard ration alongside beef, pork, bread, peas, and milk — not as a treat, but as a required allotment. Historian John Townsend of the 18th-century living history channel Townsends walks through why colonial commanders on both the British and American sides pushed this resinous, low-alcohol brew on their troops, and how it was actually made in a period kitchen or camp kettle.

• The Continental Congress’s 1775 ration order specified one quart of spruce beer or cider per soldier per day, alongside beef, pork, bread, peas, and milk.
• Fresh spruce tips and essence of spruce are naturally high in vitamin C, making the beer a deliberate defense against scurvy when fresh produce was unavailable on campaign.
• The recipe swapped malted barley for molasses as the main fermentable sugar — cheap, stable, and easy to get in North America, unlike hops and barley.

A Ration, Not a Reward

Spruce beer wasn’t handed out to boost morale on a Friday night — it was written into military law. Both British and Continental authorities treated it as a standing requirement in field orders, the same way bread or salt pork was accounted for in the daily count. Townsend’s demonstration draws on those period documents and on printed recipes of the era, including the one that appears in Amelia Simmons’ 1796 American Cookery, generally regarded as the first cookbook written by an American and published in America.

The reasoning was medical as much as logistical. Officers on long campaigns or sea voyages had already connected scurvy to a lack of fresh produce, and spruce tips or prepared spruce essence delivered a dose of vitamin C that beef and hardtack simply couldn’t. Mandating a quart a day meant every private in the ranks got that dose whether or not fresh greens were within a hundred miles of camp.

Brewing It the 18th-Century Way

Townsend’s process starts with fresh spruce clippings boiled down, or a bottled essence of spruce when the real branches weren’t on hand — a substitution period cooks and soldiers made regularly depending on the season and where the army happened to be. That liquid gets mixed with water and molasses, which stands in for the malted barley a traditional English beer would use.

Molasses won out in North America for the same reason it shows up in so much colonial cooking: it was inexpensive, kept well in a cask, and didn’t depend on a hops crop or a malting house, both of which were often scarce or unreliable on the frontier and on campaign. Yeast, or “emptins” saved from a previous batch’s dregs, kicked off fermentation. Left to work in casks, the mixture turned into a drink with a modest alcohol content and a sharp, resinous, evergreen bite that had almost nothing in common with a modern lager.

One quart of spruce beer or cider per man, per day — written into the Continental Army’s official ration alongside beef, pork, and bread.

Safer Than the Water Barrel

Beyond the anti-scurvy case, spruce beer solved a second problem armies have always had: what to put in the cup when the water source can’t be trusted. A fermented drink with even a small alcohol content was generally a safer bet than water drawn from a contaminated well or stagnant stream near an army camp. It also delivered calories the men needed on long marches, and a familiar taste that Townsend notes gave soldiers something resembling comfort food in an otherwise grim routine.

Readers who enjoy Townsend’s approach to reviving period recipes with real ingredients and real technique might also check out Bringing Back The World’s Oldest Fermented Beverage, and anyone curious about foraging spruce and pine from the same forests these soldiers marched through can look at Making a Basket from Pine Needles for another use of the same trees.

Townsend’s cask of molasses-and-spruce ends up looking nothing like the hop-heavy pints on a modern brewery menu, and that’s the point — it was built to survive a campaign, not win a tasting competition, which is exactly why a quart of it made the official Continental Army ration list in 1775.