Skip to main content
Drink

On Yeasts and Barms

A homebrew beer made by boiling water, hops, malt, and barm, then cooling and fermenting.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Malt and flour work together. They rank in the top 24% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 260 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

On Yeasts and Barms

Ingredients

Directions

Make the hop liquid

  1. Boil 3 gallons of water.

  2. Place 4 ounces of hops in a bag and add to boiling water.

  3. Boil for 30 minutes, then squeeze the bag to extract all juice.

  4. Cool the liquid to 68°F or 70°F.

Start fermentation

  1. Mix sifted malt and 1½ pints of barm with the cooled liquid to start fermentation.

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. Malt + flourtop 24% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together260 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Hops + flourtop 32% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together10 recipes

    Shared aroma: eugenol (clove, spicy).

  3. Hops + malttop 49% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1 recipe

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

What each ingredient does

Hops
Add bitterness and aroma that balance the sweetness of the malt.
Malt
Provides sugars that the yeast feeds on during fermentation.
Barm
Supplies live yeast that starts fermentation in the cooled liquid.

The step that matters

Cool the liquid to 68°F or 70°F. Yeast is killed or slowed by very hot liquid. Cooling to this range before adding the barm keeps the yeast alive and active so fermentation can begin properly.

“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

Vegetable SoupVegetable Soup350 recipesRaspberry VinegarRaspberry Vinegar214 recipesBrown Coffee with EggBrown Coffee with Egg175 recipesBlackberry CordialBlackberry Cordial129 recipes