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Drink

Ginger Beer

A fermented ginger and lemon beverage made with sugar, ginger, water, yeast, and toasted bread.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Ginger and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 5,154 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Ginger Beer

Ingredients

Directions

Make the brew

  1. Boil the sugar and ginger in 3 gallons of water for 1 hour.

  2. Once cooled, add the juice and peels of 5 lemons, and the yeast on a slice of toasted bread.

  3. Cover and let it stand in a tub for 2 to 3 days.

Bottle and serve

  1. Strain through a thick cloth and bottle it.

  2. It will be ready to drink in 4 to 5 days after bottling.

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. Ginger + lemontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,154 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  2. Sugar + gingertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together14,054 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

  3. Sugar + lemontop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  4. Lemon + breadtop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,445 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  5. Ginger + breadtop 23% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together565 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e)-2-octenal (fatty, green).

Sugar and ginger barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 14,054 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Loaf sugar
Feeds the yeast and sweetens the drink; fermentation turns much of it into carbon dioxide and alcohol.
Yeast
Ferments the sugar, producing carbon dioxide that makes the ginger beer fizzy.
Powdered ginger
Gives the drink its characteristic spicy, warming flavour and aroma.
Lemons
Add acidity and bright citrus aroma, balancing the sweetness.

The step that matters

Add the yeast only after the liquid has cooled. Yeast is a living organism that heat kills. Adding it to hot liquid would stop fermentation, so the drink would not become fizzy.

Swap the ginger

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sugar, lemon, bread):

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Marjoramfits better
  3. Nutmegfits about as well
  4. Gingerthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, lemon, bread. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“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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