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Good Yeast

A starter for cultivating yeast using hops, malt, salt, and water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
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Why it works: Hops and malt work together. They rank in the top 49% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1 recipes. Both carry guaiacol, which smells smoky, sweet. The science ↓

Good Yeast

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 160°F (70°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Make the wort

  1. Boil the hops in 1 quart of water for 5 minutes.

  2. Let the mixture cool to 160°F (70°C).

  3. Stir in the malt and cover for 3 hours.

  4. Strain and squeeze out all the liquid.

Add yeast and ferment

  1. Cool the liquid quickly to 70°F (21°C).

  2. Mix in the yeast and salt.

  3. Let it ferment for 24 hours before use.

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. Hops + malttop 49% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1 recipe

    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

Malt
Supplies sugars that the yeast ferments into gas and alcohol.
Yeast
Ferments the malt sugars, producing carbon dioxide and flavour compounds that leaven the starter.
Hops
Add bitterness and aroma to the liquid.

The step that matters

Cool the liquid quickly to 70°F (21°C) before adding the yeast. Yeast is killed or stressed by hot liquid, so the wort must be cooled before it is added. Adding yeast too early can stop fermentation before it starts.

“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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