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Drink

Excellent Table Beer

A beer brewed from malt, hops, yeast, and water, seasoned with wormwood salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Malt and hops work together. They rank in the top 49% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1 recipes. Both carry guaiacol, which smells smoky, sweet. The science ↓

Excellent Table Beer

Ingredients

Directions

Mash

  1. Pour 13 gallons of hot water over the malt and let it sit for 30 minutes.

  2. Mash the mixture and let it stand for 2.5 hours.

  3. Drain the mixture and add half of the remaining water.

  4. Mash again and pour the rest of the water over the malt, stirring well.

  5. Cover and let it infuse for 1 hour.

  6. Run off the liquid and mix all together.

Boil and cool

  1. Infuse the hops in water and add to the first run.

  2. Boil the hops with the wort for 1 hour.

  3. Strain off and cool the mixture.

  4. If not cool enough, prepare a pail of wort and add yeast overnight.

Ferment and age

  1. Before tuning, mix all wort thoroughly.

  2. Cover the bung-hole with paper for 3 days, then seal.

  3. Wait 3-4 weeks for the beer to be ready to drink.

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. 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

Malt
Provides the sugars that yeast ferments into alcohol, and the body of the beer.
Hops
Adds bitterness and aroma that balance the sweetness of the malt.
Yeast
Ferments the sugars in the wort into alcohol and carbonation.

The step that matters

Cooling the wort before adding yeast. Yeast added to wort that is still hot can be killed, stopping fermentation. The wort should be cool enough before the yeast goes in.

“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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