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Drink

Birch Wine

Fermented birch tree juice sweetened with honey or sugar, spiced with cloves and lemon peel, and clarified with egg whites.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Clove and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 10% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,150 recipes. Both carry eucalyptol, which smells eucalyptus, herbal. The science ↓

Birch Wine

Ingredients

Directions

Collect the sap

  1. Bore a hole in a birch tree one foot from the ground.

  2. Insert a faucet to collect juice for 2-3 days.

  3. Stop the hole with a peg for future use.

Make and ferment the wine

  1. Combine the juice with honey or sugar, and stir well.

  2. Boil the mixture for 1 hour, skimming continuously.

  3. Add cloves and lemon peel.

  4. When nearly cool, add enough yeast to make it work like ale.

  5. Once it begins to settle, pour the liquor into a cask.

  6. For every 20 gallons, add 1 gill of finings and the whites and shells of 4 eggs, stirring briskly.

  7. Let it stand for 6 weeks or longer.

  8. Bottle it off.

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. Clove + lemontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,150 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  2. Honey + clovetop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together736 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  3. Honey + lemontop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,707 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  4. Lemon + eggtop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together44,316 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,e)-2,4-decadienal (fatty, deep fried).

  5. Honey + eggtop 33% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,150 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

Lemon and egg barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 44,316 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

Birch tree juice
Provides the main liquid and the fermentable base of the wine.
Honey or sugar
Supplies the sugar that yeast ferments into alcohol.
Yeast
Ferments the sugars, producing alcohol and carbon dioxide.
Eggs
Whites and shells help fining, clearing suspended particles from the wine.

The step that matters

Adding yeast when nearly cool. Yeast is killed by high heat, so adding it while the mixture is still hot can stop fermentation. Waiting until it is nearly cool lets the yeast start working safely.

Swap the clove

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (honey, lemon, egg):

  1. Dillfits better
  2. Thymefits better
  3. Parsleyfits better
  4. Clovethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against honey, lemon, egg. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“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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