Name: Treacle Beer
Ingredients: 2 quarts water; 1 pound treacle or molasses; 6-8 quarts cold water; 1 teacup yeast or barm; handful of hops (optional); handful of malt (optional)

Why it works: Molasses and malt work together. They rank in the top 31% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 20 recipes. The science ↓

Treacle Beer

Ingredients

Directions

Make the wort

Boil 2 quarts of water.
Stir in 1 pound of treacle until well mixed.
Add 6-8 quarts of cold water and 1 teacup of yeast.

Ferment

Transfer to a clean cask and cover with a coarse cloth.
Let it sit for 2-3 days until ready to drink.
For larger batches, add a handful of hops and malt for fermentation.

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.

Molasses + malttop 31% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together20 recipes
Molasses + hopstop 41% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together5 recipes
Hops + malttop 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

Treacle or molasses: Provides the sugar that yeast ferments into alcohol and gives the beer its dark, sweet flavour.
Yeast or barm: Ferments the sugars into alcohol and carbon dioxide, making the drink fizzy and alcoholic.

“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.