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Brewing Half Hogsheaa of Ale

A method for brewing a half hogshead of ale using pale malt, Worcester hops, water, and yeast.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 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 ↓

Brewing Half Hogsheaa of Ale

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the mash

  1. Heat 30 gallons of water to 202°F and 13 gallons to 49°F, mixing to achieve a mean heat of 166°F.

  2. Add the malt to the mash tub and stir well; let it stand for 1.5 hours.

  3. Draw off the wort and mix it with the hops.

  4. Pour enough hot water at 200°F over the grains to fill your barrel, accounting for waste.

Boil and ferment

  1. Boil the wort and hops for 1 hour.

  2. Add 1 pint of yeast to 3 gallons of wort at 72°F to start fermentation, then add the remainder at 68°F.

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

Pale malt
Provides the fermentable sugars that the yeast turns into alcohol.
Worcester hops
Add bitterness and aroma to balance the sweetness of the malt.
Yeast
Ferments the sugars in the wort, producing alcohol and carbon dioxide.

The step that matters

Adding the yeast at the right temperature. Yeast works within a temperature range. Pitching into wort that is too hot can kill it, while wort that is too cold slows or stalls fermentation, so the wort must be cooled to the stated temperatures before the yeast goes in.

“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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