Huckleberry Spruce Tip is handpicked from the wild and captured in our drink syrup for cocktails, tea, lemonades, zero proof drink recipes, and more. For reasons we will get into, we make only one batch each year, and it goes to  our #CocktailFarmClub, (the cutoff this year is May 20th to get this special release sent to your door.)

Sweet, sour and elusive, the huckleberry is a PNW native gem. Foraging huckleberries has been a tradition in our family for generations. With the added acidity of blue spruce, harvested by PNW natives for hundreds of years, Huckleberry-Spruce tells a flavor story of summer, of our roots, and the land we love.

So why make only one batch?

Everything about the syrup is a little bit limited, in fact it’s the initial reason we were inspired to start the Cocktail Farm Club with special batches for our top fans. Mountain and coastal foraged, the wild huckleberry resists cultivation. Each year we hire a foraging team, who go out in Fall to hunt the forest and we buy whatever we can from them.

The price is steep. We’re talking more expensive than a nice steak per pound. A gallon bag costs us $60. The berries are small about half the size of a typical blueberry or the size of an eraser on a pencil. The berries are hard to find, hard to pick in large volumes, and don’t yield a ton of juice per pound. The hunt is hard, the reward is worth it.

Cleaning them is also tricky, as tiny little leaves and stems find their way into the bags. Our freezer space is also limited, but we store these precious berries from their Fall harvest until late spring, when the new growth of the spruce trees emerge.

As those bright green tips emerge from the tree, unfurling from their papery skins in a tasty lemony scented push, the timer starts. We have a limited period of time to pick the tips for ultimate flavor. When we get them just right, the flavor is bright, citrusy, with just the slightest hint of woodsy. If you wait too long, the taste turns to resin, earth.

So why even bother?

Making this syrup is so much fun, as every year it reminds us how delicious and unique a harvest can be. We tend to never do things the easy way, and this syrup is a testament to how the best things take your time, your energy, your investment.  Also, it feels like home. We love how food connects us to places, to memories, to our heritage.

Sure, blueberries are great, but there is something so deeply concentrated and unique about the juice of a huckleberry- come to the Northwest or Montana and you’ll see, we’re all crazy about them.

We grew up eating huckleberries in sourdough pancakes and jams that were picked by family members from secret spots. Here in the Northwest, to reveal those spots would be to reveal the family’s deepest, innermost secret. Never mind that some years the secret spot turns up just a single small cup of berries and a long day spent in the wilderness enjoying the view. Our aunts and uncles tell stories of good harvests and bad and love to tease the slowest pickers of the bunch. Aunt Diane is fast. Our mother is not. Huckleberries are special, they’re rare, and as Jimmy Dugan from “A League of Their Own” would say, “the hard is what makes it good.”

We knew as soon as we started this company that we would make a huckleberry drink syrup. What we weren’t certain of right away was what we would pair the berries with. We want complexity in all of our syrups, for nuanced flavors that round out a drink and help you have a balanced sip every time.

Our cousins grew up in Petersburg Alaska, where Spruce Tip jam is an annual treat. The families there harvest the tips and extract that lemon-y goodness into a jam that goes into the cupboard, into their neighbors mailboxes, makes its way to the Moose Lodge potluck. It mimics what Native Alaksans have always done, harvesting the vitamin-C rich spruce tips and using them as a tea, drinking it to prevent scurvy after long winters.

Our Alaskan cousins suggested a spruce tip syrup and we had the aha moment to combine it with huckleberries- the rest is history: truly, a little bit of Northwest history, of our history, in every bottle.

Huckleberry Spruce Tip syrup is shipped in May for the Cocktail Farm Club: the cutoff this year is May 20th to get this special release sent to your door. Locals can also find any remaining stock available at the Simple Goodness Soda Shop in Wilkeson, WA, until supplies run out.

Below: the coastal huckleberry plant, cleaning the berries to seperate leaves and stems, Belinda waiting for the cleaned berries to pass through the screen of the handmade processing machine, Belinda, Venise, and Adam with finished bags of berries, Olivia with the 2023 harvest of spruce tips.