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Ale or Beer Brewed in a Tea-kettle

A simple ale or beer brewed by steeping malt and hops in hot water in a tea kettle.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 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 ↓

Ale or Beer Brewed in a Tea-kettle

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the malt

  1. Add a handful of malt to a tea kettle.

  2. Fill the kettle with hot water, not quite boiling.

  3. Continue adding water and pouring it out until the water becomes tasteless.

Brew and ferment

  1. Boil the malt tea with the hops.

  2. Cool the mixture to about blood heat.

  3. Add a little yeast to make it permanent.

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

Malt
Provides the sugars that the yeast will ferment into alcohol and carbonation.
Hops
Adds bitterness and aroma that balance the sweetness of the malt.
Yeast
Ferments the sugars, producing alcohol and carbon dioxide that make the ale fizzy.

The step that matters

Cool the mixture to about blood heat. Yeast is killed by very hot liquid, so the mixture must be cooled to roughly body temperature before the yeast is added. Adding yeast too early can stop fermentation entirely.

“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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