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To Brew Beer

This is a method for brewing beer using water, malt, boiling water, and hops.

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 ↓

To Brew Beer

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the mash

  1. Boil 2 gallons of water in a pot.

  2. Pour the boiling water into a mash-tub and let it cool until no vapor rises.

  3. Add 2 pecks of malt and stir well.

  4. Pour in 8 gallons of boiling water, cover with a cloth, and let it stand for 3 hours.

Make and boil the wort

  1. Draw off the wort from the spigot into the pot, ensuring no grains pass through.

  2. Boil the wort and add 4 ounces of hops.

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 yeast later turns into alcohol, and the body of the beer.
Hops
Adds bitterness and aroma that balance the sweetness of the malt.

The step that matters

Letting the mash stand. Holding the malt in warm water for the full 3 hours lets its enzymes convert starches into fermentable sugars. Cutting this short leaves less sugar for fermentation, so the beer may be weak.

“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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