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The Best Ginger Beer

A fermented ginger beer made with sugar, honey, lemon or lime juice, ginger, water, egg white, and lemon essence.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and ginger match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 5,154 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

The Best Ginger Beer

Ingredients

Directions

Make the ginger liquor

  1. Boil the bruised ginger in 3 gallons of water for 30 minutes.

  2. Add the sugar, lemon or lime juice, honey, and the remaining 15 gallons of water.

  3. Boil and strain the mixture.

Ferment and bottle

  1. When cold, add the egg white and essence of lemons.

  2. Allow it to ferment for about 4 days, then bottle it.

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. Lemon + gingertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,154 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  2. Honey + gingertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,163 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  3. Lemon + honeytop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,707 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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

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

  5. Sugar + lemontop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

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

White sugar
Provides the sweetness and the food that yeast converts into carbonation and alcohol during fermentation.
White ginger
Supplies the main spicy flavour and aroma, extracted into the water by boiling.
Lemon or lime juice
Adds acidity that brightens the flavour and balances the sweetness.
Honey
Adds extra sugar and a mellow, rounded sweetness to the drink.

The step that matters

Add the egg white and essence only when the mixture is cold. Hot liquid would cook the egg white and could dull the delicate aroma of the essence, so cooling first keeps the egg white suspended and the flavour fresh.

Swap the ginger

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, lemon, honey, 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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