Name: Treacle Beer
Ingredients: 2 quarts boiling water; 1 pound treacle; 6 to 8 quarts cold water; 1 teacup yeast; handful of hops (optional); handful of malt (optional)

Why it works: Hops and malt work together. They rank in the top 49% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1 recipes. Both carry guaiacol, which smells smoky, sweet. The science ↓

Treacle Beer

Ingredients

Directions

Make the wort

Combine 2 quarts boiling water with 1 pound treacle and stir until well mixed.
Add 6 to 8 quarts cold water and 1 teacup yeast.

Ferment

Transfer the mixture into a cask.
Cover it with a coarse cloth folded several times.
Let it sit for 2 to 3 days until it is ready to drink.

Bottle and keep

For bottling, follow the same steps.
Use the bottoms of the beer as yeast for future batches.
If making a large quantity for storage, add a handful of hops and a handful of malt.
Seal it tightly after 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.

Hops + malttop 49% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together1 recipe

Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

What each ingredient does

Treacle: Provides the sugar that the yeast ferments, and gives the beer its sweetness and dark flavour.
Yeast: Ferments the sugars into alcohol and carbon dioxide, making the beer fizzy.

“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.