Skip to main content
Drink

Old Fashioned Ginger Beer

A fermented ginger beverage made with water, sugar, ginger, lemon, egg whites, and brewer's barm.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 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 ↓

Old Fashioned Ginger Beer

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Crush the ginger and place it in a large tub with cream of tartar and sliced lemons.

  2. Boil 2 gallons of water and pour it over the mixture, then cover and let it stand for 3 hours.

Make the ginger beer

  1. Add the sugar and the remaining 8 gallons of water (5 gallons boiling and 3 gallons cold), and stir.

  2. When the mixture cools to 80°F to 85°F, add the brewer's barm.

  3. Beat the egg whites until frothy and stir them into the mixture with the barm.

  4. Allow the ginger beer to ferment.

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. Egg + lemontop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together44,316 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,e)-2,4-decadienal (fatty, deep fried).

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

Ginger
Provides the spicy flavor that defines the drink.
Cream of tartar
Adds acidity that sharpens the flavor and helps keep the mixture stable.
Brewers’ barm
Contains yeast that ferments the sugar and produces carbonation.
Lump sugar
Feeds the yeast during fermentation and supplies sweetness.
Egg whites
Help clarify the liquid by collecting particles as they are stirred in.

The step that matters

Adding the barm at the right temperature. Yeast is sensitive to heat. Adding the barm while the mixture is still hot can kill it, so the mixture should cool to the stated 80°F to 85°F range before the barm goes in.

Swap the ginger

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

  1. Nutmegfits better
  2. Cinnamonfits better
  3. Tarragonfits better
  4. Gingerthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, cream, egg, lemon. 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.

You might also like

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