Name: Hop Beer
Ingredients: 3 gallons water; ½ lb hops; 3 lbs brown sugar; 3 tablespoons yeast

Why it works: Hops and sugar work together. They rank in the top 43% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 6 recipes. Both carry guaiacol, which smells smoky, sweet. The science ↓

Hop Beer

Ingredients

3 gallons water
½ lb hops
3 lbs brown sugar
3 tablespoons yeast

Directions

Make the hop liquid

Boil the hops in a small amount of water for 30 minutes.
Add the brown sugar and stir until dissolved.
Strain the mixture into a small barrel.

Ferment

Add the remaining water and the yeast.

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 + sugartop 43% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together6 recipes

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

Hops: Add bitterness and aroma that balance the sweetness of the sugar.
Brown sugar: Provides the sugar that yeast converts into alcohol and carbon dioxide during fermentation.
Yeast: Ferments the sugars, producing alcohol and carbon dioxide that gives the beer its fizz.

“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.