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Cottage Beer

A beer brewed from sweet wet bran, hops, molasses, water, and yeast.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Hops and molasses work together. They rank in the top 41% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 5 recipes. The science ↓

Cottage Beer

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the wort

  1. Boil the bran and hops in a kettle with 10 gallons of water until they sink to the bottom.

  2. Strain the mixture through a fine sieve into a cooler.

  3. When lukewarm, add 2 quarts of molasses and stir until melted.

Ferment and seal

  1. Pour the mixture into a 9 or 10-gallon cask and add 2 tablespoons of yeast.

  2. When fermentation subsides, seal the cask. It will be ready to use in 4 days.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Hops + molassestop 41% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together5 recipes

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Wet bran
Provides the starchy grain base that yeast ferments into the beer's body.
Molasses
Supplies sugar that feeds the yeast, driving fermentation and adding sweetness and color.
Yeast
Consumes the sugars and produces alcohol and carbon dioxide, turning the liquid into beer.
Hops
Add bitterness and aroma that balance the sweetness of the molasses.

The step that matters

Adding the molasses when lukewarm. Yeast is killed by very hot liquid, so the mixture must have cooled enough before the molasses and yeast go in, otherwise fermentation may fail.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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