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British Champagne

A homemade sparkling wine made with sugar, yeast, cider, almonds, and spirit.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 ingredients
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Why it works: Cider and spirit work together. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 26 recipes. Both carry ethyl octanoate, which smells fruity, wine. The science ↓

British Champagne

Ingredients

Directions

Make the base

  1. Mix loaf sugar, brown sugar, and warm water in a large container.

  2. Add yeast at the right temperature.

  3. Add sweet cider, bruised bitter almonds, pale spirit, and orris powder.

  4. Boil 3 gallons of water with 9 pounds of raw sugar for 30 minutes, skimming it clean.

  5. Pour the boiling mixture over 1 gallon of picked currants.

  6. Let it cool.

  7. Work the mixture for 2 days with ½ pint of ale yeast.

Clarify and age

  1. Strain through a flannel bag into a clean cask.

  2. Add ½ pint of isinglass finings.

  3. Seal the cask.

  4. Let it stand for a month.

Bottle

  1. Bottle the champagne.

  2. Add a small lump of loaf sugar to each bottle.

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. Cider + spirittop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together26 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  2. Sugar + almondtop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together15,679 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

  3. Almond + spirittop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together143 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  4. Sugar + spirittop 25% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together602 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

  5. Sugar + cidertop 27% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together3,308 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

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

What each ingredient does

Loaf sugar
Provides fermentable sugar that yeast converts into carbon dioxide and alcohol.
Yeast
Ferments the sugars, producing carbon dioxide for sparkle and alcohol for body.
Sweet cider
Adds fruit sugars and flavor, feeding the fermentation.
Brown sugar
Adds more fermentable sugar along with a deeper, molasses-like flavor.
Isinglass finings
Collagen-based fining that gathers suspended particles so they settle out, clearing the liquid.

The step that matters

Add yeast at the right temperature. Yeast is sensitive to heat: water that is too hot kills it, and water that is too cool slows fermentation. Warm water is needed to start the sugars fermenting steadily.

“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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