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Drink

Birch Wine

Birch wine is a fermented beverage made from birch sap, sugar, and lemon peel.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and lemon are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 18% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 53,532 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Birch Wine

Ingredients

Directions

Collect the sap

  1. Bore holes in the trunk of birch trees to collect sap, using up to 6 holes per tree.

  2. Place bottles under the holes to catch the sap.

  3. Once you have collected 4 to 5 gallons of sap, cork the bottles tightly and wax them.

Make the wine

  1. Boil the sap.

  2. Add 4 pounds of loaf sugar for every gallon.

  3. Add the thinly cut lemon peel.

  4. Boil for nearly an hour, skimming regularly.

  5. Pour the mixture into a tub and let it cool before using.

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 + lemontop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

Sugar and lemon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 53,532 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Birch sap
Forms the watery base that the sugar and other ingredients dissolve into.
Loaf sugar
Provides sweetness and the sugar that gives the drink its body and alcohol potential.
Lemon peel
Adds aromatic oils and a bright citrus flavour to the liquid.

The step that matters

Skimming while boiling. Boiling the sap for nearly an hour concentrates it and brings impurities and foam to the surface. Skimming regularly removes these, keeping the finished liquid clear and clean-tasting.

“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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