Name: Excellent Table Beer
Ingredients: 3 bushels of malt; 39 gallons of hot water; hops (for boiling and table beer); salt of wormwood (if needed)

Why it works: Malt and beer work together. They rank in the top 14% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 55 recipes. Both carry beta-damascenone, which smells apple, rose. The science ↓

Excellent Table Beer

Ingredients

3 bushels of malt
39 gallons of hot water
hops (for boiling and table beer)
salt of wormwood (if needed)

Directions

Mash

Pour one-third of the hot water over the malt.
Cover and let it sit warm for 30 minutes.

Boil and ferment

Boil the mixture with hops for the required time.
Cool the wort and add yeast.
Let it ferment and then bottle it.

Age

Store in casks for 12 months and in bottles for another 12 months before drinking.

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.

Malt + beertop 14% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together55 recipes

Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).
Hops + beertop 42% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together0 recipes

Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, fruity).
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 ferments into alcohol, and the body of the beer.
Hops: Add bitterness and aroma that balance the malt's sweetness.
Yeast (in the method): Converts the sugars in the wort into alcohol and carbon dioxide during fermentation.

“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.