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Drink

Maple-beer

Maple Beer is a fermented drink made from boiled beets, hops, and yeast.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and hops work together. They rank in the top 43% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 6 recipes. Both carry guaiacol, which smells smoky, sweet. The science ↓

Maple-beer

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the beets

  1. Clean, scrape, and wash the beets, then cut them into slices.

  2. Boil the sliced beets in 6 gallons of spring water for 2 to 3 hours until the liquid is as sweet as beer-wort.

Ferment

  1. Strain the liquid into a small cask.

  2. Add the liquid from boiling the hops to the cask.

  3. Let the mixture cool to blood heat.

  4. Add 1 teacup of good rising.

  5. Place the cask in a warm location until fermentation begins.

  6. After 2 to 3 days of fermentation, fill up the cask.

  7. Move it to a cool cellar.

  8. The beer will be ready to drink in a week to ten days.

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 + hopstop 43% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together6 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

What each ingredient does

Sugar or white beets
Supply the sugar that is boiled into the liquid and later fermented into beer.
Good rising
Starts fermentation by adding yeast to the cooled liquid.
Hops
Add bitterness and aroma to the liquid as it is boiled.

The step that matters

Cool the mixture to blood heat before adding the rising. Adding the rising to liquid that is too hot can kill the yeast, so fermentation may never start. Cooling to about body temperature keeps the yeast alive so it can convert sugars into alcohol and carbon dioxide.

“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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