Skip to main content
Drink

Ginger Beer

A fermented ginger drink made with boiling water, sugar, ginger, lemon, cream of tartar, and brewer’s yeast.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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

Prepare the lemons

  1. Remove the rinds of the lemons as thinly as possible, discarding the white pith.

  2. Cut the lemons into thin slices and remove the seeds.

Make the ginger beer

  1. In an earthenware bowl, combine the sliced lemons, sugar, ginger, and cream of tartar.

  2. Pour the boiling water into the bowl and let it stand until lukewarm.

  3. Stir in the yeast and let the bowl sit in a moderately warm place for 24 hours.

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 + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

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

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

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

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

  5. Ginger + creamtop 29% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,137 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

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

Sugar
Feeds the yeast and provides sweetness, and the fermentation turns much of it into fizz and alcohol.
Brewer's yeast
Ferments the sugar, producing carbon dioxide that makes the drink fizzy.
Lemons
Add acidity and aroma that balance the sweetness of the sugar.
Cream of tartar
Adds acidity that gives a tart flavour and helps keep the brew stable.
Whole ginger
Adds the spicy, aromatic flavour that defines the drink.

The step that matters

Let the water cool to lukewarm before adding the yeast. Boiling-hot liquid will kill yeast cells, so the mixture must cool to a warm temperature before the yeast is stirred in and fermentation can begin.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Coconutfits about as well
  3. Lemonthe original
  4. Orangefits about as well

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

More ginger beer recipes

Powder 9American 4Lemon 4English 3Molasses 3 See all 226 →

You might also like

Lemon WheyLemon Whey33 recipesLemon WineLemon Wine31 recipesGinger PopGinger Pop22 recipesGinger WineGinger Wine12 recipes