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To Enliven Awd Restore Dead Beer

A method to revive stale beer by boiling sugar or molasses in water, adding yeast, and mixing with soda.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and molasses are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 11% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 9,225 recipes. Both carry ethanol, which smells alcoholic, ethereal. The science ↓

To Enliven Awd Restore Dead Beer

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the yeast mixture

  1. Boil water with sugar or molasses until combined.

  2. Let the mixture cool, then add new yeast.

Revive the beer

  1. For sluggish worts, mix a teaspoon of carbonate of soda with a glass of beer.

  2. For every gallon of beer, boil 3 ounces of sugar in water, cool it, and add a little yeast.

  3. Pour the fermenting mixture into the beer cask.

  4. Shake the cask for a while to create new fermentation.

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 + molassestop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together9,225 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Sugar
Feeds the yeast, providing fermentable sugar that produces carbon dioxide and alcohol.
New yeast
Drives fermentation, converting sugars into carbon dioxide and alcohol to carbonate the beer.
Carbonate of soda
Raises the alkalinity of sluggish worts, helping the stalled beer regain fermentation activity.
Molasses
Supplies fermentable sugar with extra flavour, feeding the yeast in place of plain sugar.

The step that matters

Let the mixture cool before adding yeast. Yeast is killed or stressed by very hot liquid. Boiled sugar water must cool to a warm, safe temperature before yeast is added, otherwise fermentation may fail.

“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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