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Drink

To Make Birch Wine

Birch wine is made by boiling birch sap with sugar and lemon peel, fermenting with yeast, and aging.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and lemon are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 18% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 53,532 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

To Make Birch Wine

Ingredients

Directions

Collect the sap

  1. Collect birch sap by boring holes in the trees and placing bottles underneath.

  2. Cork the bottles tightly.

  3. Wax the bottles until ready to make the wine.

Make the must

  1. Boil the sap and add 4 pounds of sugar and the lemon peel.

  2. Boil for another hour, skimming regularly.

  3. Pour the mixture into a tub and let it cool slightly.

  4. Add a toast spread with yeast.

  5. Stir twice a day for 5-6 days.

Ferment and bottle

  1. In a cask, place a lighted brimstone match.

  2. Pour the wine into the cask and lightly bung it until fermentation is complete.

  3. Seal the cask tightly for about 3 months.

  4. Bottle the wine.

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 + lemontop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

Sugar and lemon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 53,532 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

Birch sap
Forms the liquid base of the wine, supplying the fermentable material.
Loaf sugar
Provides the sugar that yeast converts into alcohol during fermentation.
Yeast
Converts the sugars into alcohol and carbon dioxide during fermentation.
Lemon peel
Adds aroma and a light citrus flavor to the wine.

The step that matters

Stir twice a day for 5-6 days. Regular stirring keeps the yeast in contact with the sugars and releases carbon dioxide, helping fermentation start evenly and steadily.

“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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