It may surprise some to know that Jane Austen brewed beer. More specifically spruce beer, as she states in a letter to her sister Cassandra: "It is you, however, in this instance, that have the little children, and I that have the great cask, for we are brewing spruce beer again". She also mentions spruce beer in the novel Emma: "Mr. Knightley had been telling him something about brewing spruce-beer..". 

 

Spruce beer is brewed with the buds of a spruce tree, which has citrus and pine flavours. It was brewed in a similar way to root beer and ginger beer, and could be drunk fresh or fermented. If you google spruce beer, there are lots of modern day recipes if you wanted to try it at home.  Alcoholic drinks of the time were much weaker than modern counterparts as they were watered down substantially. 

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Brewing beer was actually quite common in Austen's era as it was generally considered safer than water, which was quite unsanitary at the time if it came from a public source. It was also a good source of vitamin C in the 1800s and so not only for the taste, it had health benefits. People would drink beer for breakfast, lunch and dinner, and it was drunk by people of different ages, so Austen would have certainly would have certainly tasted the beer she brewed. Beer is now churned out in factories following the industrial revolution and predominantly associated with men, but at the time, much like food, it was the woman's role to be the brewster. 

 

In 2017 as part of the Jane Austen 200 celebrations, a Jane Austen 200 beer, an earl grey red ale, was created at the Bath Brew House, available throughout July and the Jane Austen Festival (8th - 17th September 2017).