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Drink

Hop Yeast

A fermented beverage made from potato, flour, sugar, salt, ginger, hops, and yeast.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Potato and ginger work together. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 992 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

Hop Yeast

Oven, in the book's wordsA very moderate oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Mix grated potato, flour, sugar, salt, and ginger with cold water to form a stiff paste.

  2. Boil hops in boiling water for 10 minutes, then cool to lukewarm and strain out the hops.

Make the brew

  1. Pour the hop water over the paste, stir until well mixed, and boil for 3 minutes.

  2. Once cooled to lukewarm, stir in the yeast and beat well.

Ferment and store

  1. Let it stand in a warm room until it ferments.

  2. Pour into a stone or glass jar, cover with a clean cloth, and store in a cool place.

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. Potato + gingertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together992 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  2. Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  3. Potato + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,355 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Flour + gingertop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,564 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

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

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

Grated potato
Adds starch and moisture to the stiff paste that forms the base of the brew.
White flour
Forms the stiff paste that the hop water is poured over and mixed into.
Sugar
Provides food for the yeast, fuelling fermentation and sweetness.
Yeast
Ferments the sugars, producing carbon dioxide for fizz and building the beer's flavour.

The step that matters

Stir in the yeast only once the liquid is lukewarm. Yeast is killed by very hot liquid, so the mixture must cool to lukewarm before adding it. At that temperature the yeast stays alive and can start fermenting the sugars.

Swap the potato

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

  1. Arrowrootfits better
  2. Sweet potatofits better
  3. Parsnipfits better
  4. Potatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, sugar, ginger. 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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