A Spruce Tinged Cocktail

Wayne Curtis works to bring back an old flavoring to cocktails:

Chris Hannah, an accomplished bartender from New Orleans, was halfway up a spruce tree in northern Maine, picking at gobs of dried resin, while Misty Kalkofen—also a very good bartender, based in Boston—looked on from below. Under the pretext of a vacation, I’d lured the two of them to a remote corner of the state where I spend a part of each summer. (Cocktail-enhanced games of Scrabble may have been promised.) But when they arrived, I immediately conscripted them into a march through piney forests in search of the resin that oozes from the fissured bark of spruces and then hardens. After we gathered a reasonable amount, we returned home to the kitchen.
Spruce was a familiar flavoring in the 18th and 19th centuries, especially if you lived up north. It was found in tea, in beer, and perhaps most commonly in chewing gum—spruce gum was produced commercially all the way until the 1970s. “I have tended evening meetings up in Maine,” noted the writer Henry Wheeler Shaw in 1877, “and everybody was chewing gum except the minister.”
The taste of spruce resin is quite potent, described by one late-19th-century writer as “sweet, peculiar and balsamic.” In my experience, spruce engages not just the senses of smell and taste, but also a more primitive part of one’s brain, conjuring a dank and loamy forest. I’m mystified that a flavor this large and powerful has been forgotten by consumers.

Using the resin wasn't very easy, but they did come up with a spruce additive for a Manhattan.