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To Remove Tasteness in Beer

A method to condition beer by adding carbonate of soda, yeast, and sugar to promote fermentation.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and nutmeg are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 20% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 23,364 recipes. Both carry 1-penten-3-one, which smells fish, pungent. The science ↓

To Remove Tasteness in Beer

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Add 1 teaspoon of carbonate of soda to 1 quart of tart beer.

  2. To make bottled beer 'ripe', add 3-4 drops of yeast and a lump of sugar to each bottle.

Condition and store

  1. Let the mixture sit for 24 hours to allow fermentation.

  2. Store the bottles upright to prevent sediment from forming.

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 + nutmegtop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together23,364 recipes

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

Sugar and nutmeg barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 23,364 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

Carbonate of soda
Neutralises some of the beer's acidity, mellowing its tartness.
Yeast
Ferments the remaining sugar, producing carbon dioxide that carbonates the beer in the bottle.
Sugar
Feeds the yeast, supplying the fuel for the second fermentation.

The step that matters

Adding yeast and sugar to each bottle. The yeast and sugar start a second fermentation inside the sealed bottle. This produces carbon dioxide, which builds pressure, so the amounts need to be measured carefully for each bottle.

“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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