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Drink

To Make Ginger Beer

A fermented ginger beverage made with ginger, sugar, cream of tartar, water, and yeast.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Cream and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 43,450 recipes. Both carry 2,3-butanedione, which smells butter, sweet. The science ↓

To Make Ginger Beer

Ingredients

Directions

Make the wort

  1. In an earthen vessel, combine the ginger, cream of tartar, and sugar.

  2. Pour the boiling water over the mixture.

  3. Let it cool.

Ferment

  1. Add the yeast.

  2. Stir gently.

  3. Cover.

  4. Let it sit overnight.

  5. Skim off any foam.

Bottle and store

  1. Bottle the ginger beer.

  2. Store the bottles in a cool place for three days before using.

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

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

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

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

  3. 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 flavour and aroma of the drink.
Cream of tartar
Adds acidity, giving the drink a tangy taste and helping keep the mixture stable.
White sugar
Feeds the yeast, which turns sugar into carbon dioxide that carbonates the drink.
Yeast
Ferments the sugar, producing carbon dioxide for fizziness and some alcohol.

The step that matters

Store the bottles in a cool place for three days before using. Fermentation continues inside sealed bottles and produces carbon dioxide. Carbonation builds gradually, and the bottles can build dangerous pressure if they are kept warm or used too early.

Swap the ginger

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

  1. Nutmegfits better
  2. Cinnamonfits better
  3. Gingerthe original
  4. Peppermintfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against 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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