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Drink

To Make Ginger Beer

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

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 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 mixture

  1. Bruise the ginger and combine it with cream of tartar, lemon juice, and lemon peel in a large container.

  2. Add the loaf sugar and pour in the boiling water. Stir until the sugar dissolves.

Ferment and bottle

  1. Once the mixture cools slightly, add the yeast.

  2. Bottle the mixture in stone jars before it cools completely.

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. Cream + sugartop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

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

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

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

  4. Lemon + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

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

  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

Ginger
Provides the characteristic spicy, aromatic flavor of the drink.
Cream of tartar
Adds acidity that gives the drink its tang and helps keep the flavor balanced.
Loaf sugar
Dissolves into the water to provide sweetness and the sugar the yeast ferments.
Yeast
Ferments the sugar, producing carbon dioxide that makes the drink fizzy.

The step that matters

Adding the yeast after the mixture cools slightly. Yeast is killed by very hot liquid, so it must be added only once the mixture has cooled enough to be safe for it, yet still warm enough to start fermenting.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Coconutfits about as well
  3. Lemonthe original
  4. Orangefits about as well

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