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Drink

Ginger Beer

A fermented ginger drink made with boiling water, ginger, sugar, yeast, and bread.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Cream and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 43,450 recipes. Both carry 2,3-butanedione, which smells butter, sweet. The science ↓

Ginger Beer

Ingredients

Directions

Make the mixture

  1. Combine boiling water, bruised ginger, cream of tartar, and loaf sugar in a large pan.

  2. Stir until the sugar is dissolved.

  3. Let the mixture cool until it is warm like new milk.

Ferment

  1. Add 2 teaspoons of yeast on a small piece of bread.

  2. Cover the pan with a cloth and let it sit for a whole day.

Bottle and serve

  1. Strain the mixture and bottle it, being careful not to overfill the bottles.

  2. Cork the bottles tightly and tie them down.

  3. The ginger beer will be ready to drink after two 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. Cream + sugartop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

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

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

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

  3. Ginger + breadtop 23% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together565 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e)-2-octenal (fatty, green).

  4. Cream + breadtop 24% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together5,789 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

  5. Ginger + creamtop 29% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,137 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

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

Yeast
Ferments the sugar, producing carbon dioxide that makes the drink fizzy.
Loaf sugar
Provides the sugar that yeast consumes, along with sweetness in the finished drink.
Cream of tartar
Adds acidity, giving the drink a tangy, sharp flavour.
Bruised ginger
Supplies the main aroma and spicy flavour of the drink.

The step that matters

Let the mixture cool until it is warm like new milk. Yeast is killed by very hot liquid, so adding it too early can stop fermentation. Cooling to lukewarm keeps the yeast alive and active for the fizz to develop.

Swap the ginger

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

  1. Nutmegfits better
  2. Cinnamonfits better
  3. Celeryfits about as well
  4. Gingerthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against cream, sugar, bread. 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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