There’s a funny thing about owning a distillery in the Pacific Northwest: winter may slow the tasting room down, but it never really slows us down. While the world assumes we’re hibernating beside a dormant still, we’re actually watching the weather like race fans track lap times. Around here, the off-season isn’t idle – it’s anticipatory. It smells like damp earth and cedar bark. It sounds like rain on a metal roof. And it tastes like what’s coming next.
Spring in the forests around Bellingham doesn’t tiptoe in – it arrives..intensely. The first true warm stretch feels like someone cranked the saturation up on the entire landscape. Moss electrifies. Ferns unfurl. Hillsides soften. The shades of green are so vivid they feel almost fictional.
An hour and a half east off Highway 20, we have a cabin outside Marblemount. And that shift from winter to spring feels even more dramatic. We planted a patch of spruce trees at the cabin during the Pandemic in 2021 – tiny, hopeful things at the time. Now, each spring, we make our first pilgrimage of the season out to see them. It’s become a ritual: boots by the door, coffee in hand, gravel crunching under tires, and that unmistakable scent of wet forest air when you step out of the truck.
Harvest Time
The first visit is always a little bit magical. The soil is dark and rich. The river runs high and cold. Stella (our boxer) gets a bit rambunctious in her enthusiasm to be out in the woods again. Everything feels newly rinsed. And then – there they are.
Spruce tips. Soft, neon-green bursts at the ends of branches, tender and citrusy and bright. For the last two years, those tips have been substantial enough to do more than admire. They’ve been worthy of harvest. And worthy of becoming part of Speed Shift history.
Scott and I head out each spring to gather them by hand. There’s something grounding about it. The flavor is unlike anything you can source from a catalog. It’s alive. It’s fleeting. It tastes like the exact moment winter gives up.
Back at the distillery, those foraged spruce tips become more than a seasonal experiment – they become our Spruced Up EnGIN, a bottle that quite literally captures the forest at its brightest.
But before any introductions are made to juniper and vapor, some of those tips take a detour into something just as special: Spruce Tip Simple Syrup.
Spruce Tip Simple Syrup Receipe
Ingredients
- 3 cups spruce tips, chopped, (approx 300 gms)
- 2 cups white sugar (approx 400gms)
- 2 cups water (480ml)
Steps for Spruce Tip Simple Syrup
1
Bring the sugar and water to a boil in a saucepan. Boil 3 minutes ensuring that all the sugar is absorbed.
2
Remove the saucepan from heat. Add the spruce tips, stirring to completely coat and submerge them.
3
Cover the pot and steep the tips in the syrup overnight.
4
The next day, strain out the spruce tips (cheesecloth works great) and bottle.
5
Store in fridge and use to sweeten cocktails or sparkling water.
NOTES:
Makes about ~1¾ cups spruce tip simple syrup.
Yes, you can absolutely use brown sugar or raw cane sugar -they are both delicious options. Just keep in mind that they will add deeper, richer notes that change the overall flavor profile. That difference can carry through to the finished drink, particularly in cocktails made with lighter spirits where the syrup’s character will be more noticeable.
How to Use Spruce Tip Simple Syrup
Spruce tip simple syrup is what you reach for when you want a cocktail to taste like spring. It brings a bright, citrusy lift with subtle evergreen depth – think lemon zest meets fresh pine, without the heaviness. In gin cocktails especially, it plays beautifully with botanicals, amplifying the juniper while adding a soft, forest-fresh sweetness that feels layered and intentional. It turns a standard Gin & Tonic into something transportive and gives our Evergreen Express (an EnGINeered Tom Collins) a distinctly Pacific Northwest accent.
Beyond gin, it’s a secret weapon in more places than you’d expect. Add it to a vodka soda for a clean, aromatic twist. Shake it into a whiskey sour for a woodsy contrast to caramel notes. Stir a spoonful into sparkling water with fresh lime for a zero-proof refresher that still feels crafted. However you use it, spruce tip simple syrup adds dimension, sweetness with a sense of place, like you bottled up that first glowing week of spring and poured it straight into the glass. Enjoy!