Skip to main content
Drink

Rice-Beer

A fermented beverage made from soaked rice, water, and sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Rice and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 26% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,744 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Rice-Beer

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the rice

  1. Soak the special rice in water for 10 days.

  2. Steam the rice and mix it with water and sugar.

Ferment

  1. Keep the mixture at a high temperature (around 95°F or 35°C) for fermentation.

  2. Allow the mixture to ferment for several days until it develops a yellow color and reaches about 5% alcohol.

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. Rice + sugartop 26% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together8,744 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Special rice
Supplies starch that is broken down into sugars for the fermentation to use.
Water
Hydrates the rice and forms the liquid medium in which fermentation takes place.
Sugar
Provides readily fermentable sugar that is converted into alcohol.

The step that matters

Keep the fermentation at about 95°F (35°C). Fermenting microbes work best within a narrow temperature range. If the mixture runs too cool, fermentation slows or stalls, and if it runs too hot, the microbes can be harmed or produce off flavors. Holding the temperature steady keeps fermentation even and predictable.

“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.

You might also like

Rice WaterRice Water82 recipesRice MilkRice Milk37 recipesGround Rice MilkGround Rice Milk7 recipesVegetable SoupVegetable Soup350 recipes