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 ↓
White Spruce Beer
Ingredients
Directions
Make the beer
Dissolve the sugar in the water.
Add enough essence of spruce to flavor the mixture.
Stir in the yeast and optional lemon peel.
Allow to ferment.
Bottle and serve
Bottle the beer tightly after fermentation.
Enjoy as a refreshing beverage in warm weather.
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.
Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it
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.
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Sugar + lemontop 18% of all pairsSmell alikelowCooked 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
- Loaf sugar
- Feeds the yeast, which turns the sugar into alcohol and carbon dioxide during fermentation.
- Yeast
- Ferments the sugar, producing alcohol and carbon dioxide that give the beer its character and fizz.
- Essence of spruce
- Provides the aromatic spruce flavor that defines the beer.
The step that matters
Bottle the beer tightly after fermentation. Yeast keeps producing carbon dioxide after fermentation, so the bottles must seal well to hold the gas and carbonation. Loose bottles can lose fizz or burst under pressure.
“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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