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Drink

To Make Ginger Beer

A fermented ginger beverage made with ginger, sugar, lemon, yeast, brandy, and water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Ginger and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 5,154 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

To Make Ginger Beer

Ingredients

Directions

Make the ginger liquid

  1. Bruise the ginger and sugar, then boil them in the water for 20 to 25 minutes.

  2. Slice the lemons and place them in a large pan with the cream of tartar.

  3. Pour the boiling liquid over the lemon and cream of tartar mixture, stir well, and let it cool to milk warm.

Ferment

  1. Add the yeast, cover the pan, and let it sit for 2 to 3 days, skimming frequently.

  2. If fermentation is slow, add a little more yeast, but avoid adding too much.

  3. Strain the mixture through a jelly bag into a cask, add the brandy, and seal tightly.

Bottle

  1. After 2 to 3 weeks, draw it off into bottles, cork tightly, and secure the corks with twine or wire.

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. Ginger + lemontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,154 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  2. Sugar + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

  3. Cream + brandytop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,635 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-heptanol (bitter, floral).

  4. Ginger + sugartop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together14,054 recipes

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

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

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

Ginger and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 14,054 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

Ginger
Provides the characteristic spicy flavour and aroma of the beer.
Sugar
Feeds the yeast, which turns it into carbonation and alcohol during fermentation.
Cream of tartar
Adds acidity, which brightens the flavour and helps keep the brew stable.
Ale yeast
Ferments the sugars, producing carbonation and alcohol.
Lemons
Add acidity and citrus aroma to the drink.

The step that matters

Cooling to milk warm before adding the yeast. Yeast works best at mild warmth. If the liquid is still hot, it can kill the yeast and stall fermentation, while a cool liquid slows it down.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (ginger, sugar, cream, brandy):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Apricotfits better
  3. Peachfits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against ginger, sugar, cream, brandy. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“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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