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Drink

Birch Wine

A fermented beverage made from birch water, 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 ↓

Birch Wine

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the wort

  1. Boil birch water for 30 minutes.

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

  3. Pour into a tub and let cool completely.

Ferment

  1. Stir in yeast three to four times a day for 4 to 5 days.

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

  3. Add new ale and mix well in the cask for 5 to 6 days.

  4. 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 ferment into wine.
Brown sugar
Provides the fermentable sugar that yeast converts to alcohol and flavour.
Yeast
Converts the sugars into alcohol and carbon dioxide during fermentation.
Malaga raisins
Add extra sugar and fruity flavour to the fermenting liquid.
Loaf sugar
Adds more fermentable sugar, feeding the yeast and raising the alcohol level.
New ale
Adds live yeast and malt character to restart and carry the fermentation.

The step that matters

Let cool completely before adding yeast. Yeast is killed by hot liquid, so adding it before the wort has cooled can stop fermentation before it starts. Cooling fully protects the yeast and keeps the wine from taking on cooked off-flavours.

“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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