Brewing with Pine (or Fir) Needles?

So with it being the holiday season I currently have a Christmas tree up in my living room. My apartment smells great! My tree is a concolor fir, also known as a white fir. This is by far my favorite type of tree to use for Christmas as the needles smell very strongly of citrus. Seriously, if you get a handful of needles and rub them in your palms it smells more like oranges than a pine tree. So my thought is that it would be really interesting to try to intoroduce these into a recipe somehow, but I don't really know the best way of doing that.

Has anyone tried using pine needles before? Should I dehydrate them before using, or should I use them fresh? Do you think it would work best to use them like you would for dryhopping? Or maybe throw them in with some orange peels in a witbier? Would pine needles just totally mess with the beer's funk after fermenting?

Let me know what you think!

 

I wasn't considering the fact that firs and pines and spruces are all different types of evergreen. So is there any reason to think that the needles from my fir tree couldn't be used just like spruce needles?

 

I hadn't heard of this one. I'll have to do some "research".

 

Short update:
I've been doing quite a bit of research regarding how people brew with spruce tips since that's more commonly used than pine or fir needles. Most people seem to boil them, but the batch I made this past Tuesday is being split into two 2.5 gallon batches and I didn't want both of them to be piney since these will both be different experimental batches. Instead, I'm going to throw the fir needles in with my dry-hopping hops for one of the 2.5 gallon batches and see how it goes.

 

Do you think freezing them would suffice? They've been in a jar in the freezer for a few days now for storage.

 

Quick update 2: I dropped 1 ounce of frozen fir needles into the 2.5 gallon batch in the fermenter along with my dry hops. I'm bottling on Tuesday, but I cracked the fermenter open today to get a smell and it's smelling great! It has seemingly pulled a lot of aroma out of the needles. In about 2 weeks I'll see if that transfers into a good flavor.

 

I bottled on Wednesday 1/13/2015 after 2 weeks of fermentation. No signs of infection so it seems I got by ok with just freezing the needles and not boiling them or anything. I'm really happy with the clarity even though there was quite a bit of stuff in the bottom of the fermenter. I didn't use a secondary or do a cold crash or anything. This is only my second batch of beer ever so I'm just happy it is clearer than milk. When I transferred to the bottling bucket I just put the siphon in a fine mesh bag so it would suck up any of the hops or needles. I'll probably put all the dry hops and needles in a bag next time as I lost a decent amount of liquid that I just couldn't suck up past everything at the bottom of the bucket. I filled 20 bottles from this 2.5 gallon batch.

 

That's probably not a bad idea. The gin would probably still be drinkable afterwards too.