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Another Cheap Beer

A low-cost beer brewed with hops, ginger, bran, treacle, yeast, and water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Hops and ginger work together. They rank in the top 24% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 3 recipes. Both carry eucalyptol, which smells eucalyptus, herbal. The science ↓

Another Cheap Beer

Ingredients

Directions

Make the wort

  1. Boil the hops and ginger in 15 gallons of water for 1 hour and 15 minutes.

  2. Add the bran.

  3. Boil for an additional 20 minutes.

  4. Strain the mixture over the treacle.

  5. Stir well.

  6. Let it cool until it is milk-warm (60°F to 70°F).

  7. Strain it through a thick cloth over a sieve.

Ferment and store

  1. Add 4 to 5 ounces of yeast.

  2. Stir well.

  3. When cold, transfer it to a cask.

  4. Keep filling it until fermentation is complete, which may take 2 days.

  5. Once fermentation is done, seal the cask.

  6. It will be ready to drink in 2 days.

  7. It can be kept in the cask for 10 days to 2 weeks or bottled.

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. Hops + gingertop 24% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together3 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

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

What each ingredient does

Hops
Adds bitterness and aroma that balance the sweetness of the treacle.
Treacle
Provides the sugar that the yeast ferments into alcohol and carbonation.
Yeast
Ferments the sugars into alcohol and carbon dioxide, making the beer.
Bran
Adds body and starches that contribute to the texture of the brew.

The step that matters

Cooling to milk-warm before adding yeast. Yeast works within a limited temperature range. Adding it while the liquid is too hot can kill the yeast, while adding it when cold slows fermentation, so the wort should be cooled to milk-warm first.

“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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