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Drink

Light Summer Table Beer

A light beer brewed from water, yeast, hops, carbonate, and brown sugar, fermented and aged for weeks.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Hops and sugar work together. They rank in the top 43% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 6 recipes. Both carry guaiacol, which smells smoky, sweet. The science ↓

Light Summer Table Beer

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the wort

  1. Boil 19 pints of water for an hour.

  2. Wash the mashing tub well.

  3. Pour the cooled wort into the mashing tub.

  4. Add 1 pint of yeast when the wort cools to the temperature of new milk.

  5. Cover the tub with a cloth.

  6. Let the mixture ferment until the next day.

Ferment and age in cask

  1. Pour the mixture into a barrel before it begins to sink.

  2. Rack the mixture before sealing the barrel.

  3. Seal the barrel.

  4. Let it sit for two to three weeks until it is ready to drink.

  5. Rack the mixture into a 44-gallon cask with 8 oz. of new hops.

  6. Seal the cask tightly.

  7. Store the cask in a cellar for at least six months.

Bottle and store

  1. Add ¼ teaspoon of carbonate of soda to each bottle of sour ale.

  2. Add 1 large teaspoon of brown sugar to each bottle of sour ale.

  3. Cork the bottles well.

  4. Store the bottles cork down for three weeks.

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. Hops + sugartop 43% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together6 recipes

    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

Yeast
Starts fermentation, converting sugars in the wort into alcohol and carbon dioxide.
New hops
Adds bitterness and aroma, and helps preserve the beer.
Brown sugar
Provides sugars that feed further fermentation and carbonation in the bottles.

The step that matters

Adding yeast at the right temperature. Yeast added to wort that is still hot can be killed, stopping fermentation. Wort should cool to about lukewarm, like new milk, before yeast is added.

“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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