Name: How to Manage Four Bushels of Malt
Ingredients: 4 bushels pale malt; 36 gallons water at 182°F; 58 gallons water at 190°F; 2 pounds hops; ½ pound hops; sugar (as needed)

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 ↓

How to Manage Four Bushels of Malt

Ingredients

Directions

Mash and sparge

Mash the malt with 36 gallons of water at 182°F for 2.5 hours.
Draw off the mash into the underback.
Sparge with 58 gallons of water at 190°F until you have about 38 gallons of wort.

Boil and hop

Boil the strong-ale wort with 2 pounds of hops for 45 minutes.
Add ½ pound of hops and boil for an additional 30 minutes.

Check and adjust

Cool some wort to 60°F and check its strength with a saccharometer.
Draw off 7 gallons for table-beer and adjust the remaining wort with sugar to reach desired gravity.

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 + sugartop 17% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together325 recipes

Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).
Hops + sugartop 43% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together6 recipes

Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).
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

Pale malt: Provides the fermentable sugars that give the ale its body and alcohol.
Hops: Add bitterness that balances the malt sweetness and contribute aroma.
Sugar: Raises the fermentable sugar content to reach the desired strength.

The step that matters

Sparge with 58 gallons of water at 190°F until you have about 38 gallons of wort.. Sparging rinses the remaining sugars from the grain bed. Stopping at the right volume matters because the wort's strength depends on how much sugar is collected, and collecting too much or too little changes the final gravity.

“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.