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Brewing of Beer

A method for brewing beer from barley malt, water, hops, and yeast.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Barley and malt work together. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 32 recipes. Both carry decadienal, which smells fried, fat. The science ↓

Brewing of Beer

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the malt

  1. Clean the barley malt by screening, sifting, and blowing.

  2. Crush the malt and mash it with water in large tubs at the proper temperature.

  3. Draw off the wort and wash the residue of grain with hot water.

Brew the wort

  1. Boil the wort in copper kettles for about four hours, adding hops during the last hour.

  2. Cool the wort and add yeast at a rate of about 1 pound per barrel.

Ferment and settle

  1. Allow fermentation to occur, then transfer the beer into settling tuns and casks for 5 to 8 months.

  2. Add beech-tree shavings to the beer to collect floating solid particles.

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. Barley + malttop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together32 recipes

    Shared aroma: decadienal (fried, fat).

  2. Malt + hopstop 49% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1 recipe

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  3. Barley + hopstop 76% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together0 recipes

    Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, fruity).

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

What each ingredient does

Prepared barley malt
Provides the starches that are converted to sugars during mashing, which yeast later ferments into alcohol.
Hops
Add bitterness and aroma that balance the malt's sweetness.
Yeast
Ferments the sugars in the wort, producing alcohol and carbon dioxide.

The step that matters

Adding yeast to the cooled wort. Yeast must be added only after the wort has cooled, because high heat kills it. The amount added sets how vigorously fermentation starts, so the rate matters.

“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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