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Drink

Root-beer

Root beer is a fermented beverage made from water, sugar, ginger, Hire's extract, and yeast.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and ginger are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 17% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,054 recipes. Both carry 1-penten-3-one, which smells fish, pungent. The science ↓

Root-beer

Ingredients

Directions

Make the root beer

  1. Combine all ingredients in an earthenware jar and stir until the sugar is dissolved.

Bottle and ferment

  1. Bottle immediately, ensuring the corks are tied securely.

  2. Use the beer after it has fermented for one week.

Serve

  1. Chill the beer on ice before serving.

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 + gingertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together14,054 recipes

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

Sugar and ginger 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

Sugar
Feeds the yeast, and fermentation turns it into carbon dioxide and alcohol, giving fizz.
Baker's yeast
Drives fermentation, converting sugar into carbon dioxide that carbonates the beer.
Extract of ginger
Adds the spicy ginger aroma and flavor.
Hire's extract
Provides the main root beer flavor.

The step that matters

Bottle immediately with corks tied securely. Fermentation continues in sealed bottles and produces carbon dioxide, which builds pressure. Corks that are not secured can be pushed out by that pressure, so they must be tied firmly.

“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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