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Drink

Table- Beer

A beer brewed from malt, hops, and sugar, boiled and cooled to produce a light refreshing drink.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Malt and sugar work together. They rank in the top 17% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 325 recipes. Both carry beta-damascenone, which smells apple, rose. The science ↓

Table- Beer

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the wort

  1. Draw off the second run from the boiler.

  2. Pour in the table beer wort and check its strength with a saccharometer.

Boil with hops

  1. Add the boiled hops and boil for two hours.

  2. Percolate five or six gallons of wort through the boiled hops to extract ale-wort.

  3. Drain the hops and discard them, then return the strained wort to the copper.

Cool and sweeten

  1. Cool the wort to 60°F and add sugar to raise its strength as desired.

  2. For 6 gallons of wort, add 8 pounds of sugar for a light refreshing drink.

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 + sugartop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together325 recipes

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

  2. Hops + sugartop 43% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together6 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  3. 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 fermentable sugars that give the wort its base strength and body.
Hops
Add bitterness and aroma that balance the sweetness of the wort.
Sugar
Raises the strength of the wort and adds fermentable sweetness for a lighter drink.

The step that matters

Cool the wort to 60°F before adding sugar. Adding sugar to hot wort can scorch it and drive off aroma, so cooling first keeps the sugar clean and the flavour fresh.

“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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