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To Make Birch Wine a Second Ivay

Birch wine is made by boiling birch water with sugar, fermenting with yeast, adding raisins, loaf-sugar, isinglass, and new ale, then aging for a year.

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 Ivay

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Boil birch water for 30 minutes.

  2. Add sugar and boil for 45 minutes, skimming regularly.

  3. Pour into a tub and let cool completely.

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

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

  6. Add new ale and mix well for 5-6 days.

  7. 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 sugar and yeast ferment into wine.
Bastard sugar
Provides the fermentable sugar that yeast converts into alcohol.
Yeast
Drives fermentation by converting sugars into alcohol and carbon dioxide.
Malaga raisins
Add extra sugars and body to feed the fermentation.
Isinglass
Clarifies the wine by helping suspended particles settle out.

The step that matters

Skimming while boiling. Skimming removes foam and impurities that rise during boiling, leaving a cleaner liquid that ferments more predictably and clears better later.

“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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