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Herb Beer

A simple herbal beer made by mixing herb extract, sugar, water, and yeast, then fermenting and bottling.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Beer and sugar work together. They rank in the top 22% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 699 recipes. Both carry beta-damascenone, which smells apple, rose. The science ↓

Herb Beer

Ingredients

Directions

Make the wort

  1. Add 2 tablespoons of herb beer extract to 1.5 pounds of clean moist sugar.

  2. Pour 1 gallon of boiling water over the mixture and stir until fully dissolved.

  3. Add 1 gallon of cold water.

Ferment and bottle

  1. Ferment for 6 hours in a warm place, adding 3-4 tablespoons of good barm on toast or 1 oz. of German yeast.

  2. Strain out any bits from the sugar and bottle the mixture using good corks soaked in water.

  3. Lay the bottles on their sides to keep the corks moist and retain the beer's strength.

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. Beer + sugartop 22% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together699 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Herb beer extract
Provides the main herbal flavour and aroma of the beer.
Clean moist sugar
Supplies the fermentable sugar that yeast converts into alcohol and carbon dioxide.
Barm or german yeast
Starts fermentation by converting the sugar into alcohol and carbon dioxide.

The step that matters

Ferment for 6 hours in a warm place. Yeast works best at warm temperatures; if the mixture is too cold, fermentation stalls, and if it is too hot, the yeast can be killed or produce off-flavours.

“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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