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To Make Birch Wine a Second Way

Birch wine made by fermenting birch sap with sugar, yeast, raisins, loaf sugar, isinglass, and new ale.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and raisin are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 13% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 12,481 recipes. Both carry beta-damascenone, which smells apple, rose. The science ↓

To Make Birch Wine a Second Way

Ingredients

Directions

Boil the birch water

  1. Boil birch water for 30 minutes.

  2. Add brown sugar and boil for 45 minutes, skimming constantly.

Ferment

  1. Pour into a tub and let cool completely.

  2. Stir in yeast 3-4 times a day for 4-5 days.

  3. Transfer to a cask with raisins, loaf sugar, and dissolved isinglass.

  4. Add new ale and mix well in the cask for 5-6 days.

Age and bottle

  1. Seal the cask and let it stand for a year before bottling.

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. Sugar + raisintop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,481 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Birch water
Forms the liquid base that the sugars and yeast work in.
Brown sugar
Provides the fermentable sugar that yeast turns into alcohol, and adds sweetness.
Yeast
Ferments the sugars into alcohol and carbon dioxide.
Malaga raisins
Add fruity sweetness, flavour and body to the wine.
Isinglass
Acts as a fining agent that helps clear the wine by settling out suspended particles.

The step that matters

Let the liquid cool completely before adding yeast. Yeast is killed by high heat, so the boiled liquid must cool fully before yeast is stirred in. Adding yeast too early can stop fermentation before it starts.

“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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