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Treacle Beer

A sweet beer made with brown sugar, treacle, ginger, hops, and yeast.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and ginger are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 17% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,054 recipes. Both carry 1-penten-3-one, which smells fish, pungent. The science ↓

Treacle Beer

Ingredients

Directions

Make the wort

  1. Boil brown sugar, treacle, bruised ginger, and hops with 3 quarts of water for a few minutes.

  2. Strain the mixture.

  3. Add 5 quarts of cold water.

Ferment and bottle

  1. Stir in 1 tablespoon of yeast.

  2. Let it work overnight.

  3. Bottle the mixture in the morning.

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. Sugar + gingertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together14,054 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

  2. Ginger + hopstop 24% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together3 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  3. Sugar + hopstop 43% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together6 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

Sugar and ginger barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 14,054 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

Brown sugar
Provides fermentable sugar for the yeast and adds sweetness and depth of flavour.
Treacle
Adds sweetness, dark colour and a rich molasses flavour to the beer.
Yeast
Ferments the sugars into alcohol and carbon dioxide, making the beer fizzy.
Hops
Adds bitterness and aroma that balances the sweetness of the sugars and treacle.

The step that matters

Add the yeast to cooled liquid. Yeast is killed by high heat, so the wort must be cooled, here by adding cold water, before the yeast goes in. Adding it too early can stop fermentation.

Swap the ginger

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sugar, hops):

  1. Cinnamonfits about as well
  2. Gingerthe original
  3. Nutmegfits less well
  4. Clovefits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, hops. 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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