I’m really liking the smell and flavour of the brewer’s pitch I bought from Jas Townsend and Son. This may be an aquired taste. Some people like the smell of gasoline. I actually like the smell of turpentine, this might have something to do with it. But brewer’s pitch is not solventy at all, it’s more like the incense you would smell at a church which is also a resin but from a different type of tree. When pine sap is distilled two products are produced rossin and turpentine. From my understanding rossin is just a more solid form of brewer’s pitch. Another thing that is interesting about pine pitch is that it contains beta-pinene which is also a major constituent of hop aroma and flavour. To test the pitch that I bought I placed an ounce of it in a litre of water and left it in the fridge for 5 days. I was very excited when after the 3 days I noticed a pronounced pine pitch flavour. For my beer experiment I decided to put some into my second batch of homegrown beer, a very hoppy lager. 3 weeks later at bottling I could detect it but it was very faint and mostly masked by the strong hop flavour.
Brewing Beer The Hard Way 