Name: Fine Welch Ale
Ingredients: 4 bushels pale malt; 21 gallons hot water (not boiling); 2 pounds hops

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 ↓

Fine Welch Ale

Ingredients

4 bushels pale malt
21 gallons hot water (not boiling)
2 pounds hops

Directions

Pour 21 gallons of hot water over 4 bushels of pale malt.
Cover and let it stand for 3 hours.
Infuse 2 pounds of hops in a little hot water.
Run the wort over the infused hops.

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.

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

Pale malt: Provides the fermentable sugars and body that the ale is built on.
Hops: Adds bitterness and aroma that balance the sweetness of the malt.

“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.