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Drink

Excellent Table Beer

A beer brewed from malt, hops, water, and yeast, fermented for several weeks.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Malt and hops 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 ↓

Excellent Table Beer

Ingredients

Directions

Mash

  1. Pour hot water over the malt.

  2. Cover the malt and let it stand warm for 30 minutes.

  3. Mash the malt and let it stand for 2.5 hours.

  4. Drain the liquid.

  5. Add half the remaining water to the mash.

  6. Mash again and let it stand for 30 minutes.

  7. Pour the rest of the water on the malt.

  8. Stir well.

  9. Cover and let it stand for 1 hour.

  10. Combine all liquid.

Boil and cool

  1. Infuse hops in water.

  2. Add the infused hops to the mixture.

  3. Boil the hops with the wort for 1 hour.

  4. Strain off the solids.

  5. Cool the mixture.

  6. If the mixture is not cool enough, prepare additional wort.

  7. Add yeast to the additional wort overnight.

Ferment and age

  1. Mix all wort thoroughly.

  2. Transfer the wort to the fermentation vessel.

  3. Cover with paper for 3 days.

  4. Seal tightly.

  5. After 3-4 weeks, the beer will be ready to drink.

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. Malt + hopstop 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
Provides the fermentable sugars that feed the yeast and form the beer's body.
Hops
Adds bitterness and aroma that balance the sweetness of the malt.
Yeast
Ferments the sugars in the wort into alcohol and carbonation.

The step that matters

Cool the mixture before adding yeast. Yeast is killed by hot liquid, so the wort must cool enough before yeast 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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