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Drink

Excellent Table Beer

A malt and hops beer brewed in large quantities by mashing, boiling, fermenting with yeast, and aging in a cask.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Malt and hops 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 ↓

Excellent Table Beer

Ingredients

Directions

Mash

  1. Pour 13 gallons of hot water over the malt and cover for 30 minutes.

  2. Mash and let it stand for 2.5 hours, then drain.

  3. Add half the remaining water, mash, and let it stand for 30 minutes.

  4. Run that into another tub and pour the rest of the water on the malt, stirring well and covering for 1 hour.

  5. Mix all the liquid together.

Boil and cool

  1. Infuse 1.5 pounds of hops in water and add to the first running.

  2. Boil the hops with the wort for 1 hour.

  3. Strain off and cool the wort.

  4. If not cool enough, prepare a pail or two of wort and add 1 quart of yeast overnight.

  5. Before tunning, mix all the wort thoroughly.

Ferment and age

  1. Cover the bunghole with paper for 3 days, then seal it.

  2. In 3-4 weeks, the beer will be ready to drink.

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. Malt + hopstop 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

Malt
Provides the fermentable sugars that the yeast turns into alcohol.
Hops
Adds bitterness and aroma that balance the sweetness of the malt.
Yeast
Ferments the sugars in the wort into alcohol and carbon dioxide.

The step that matters

Cooling the wort before adding yeast. If the wort is still hot when yeast is added, the yeast can be killed, stopping fermentation. Cooling it enough first keeps the yeast alive so the beer ferments properly.

“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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