Name: Beer Without Malt
Ingredients: 4 pounds coarse brown sugar; 3 ounces hops; 10 gallons water

Why it works: Sugar and hops work together. They rank in the top 43% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 6 recipes. Both carry guaiacol, which smells smoky, sweet. The science ↓

Beer Without Malt

Ingredients

4 pounds coarse brown sugar
3 ounces hops
10 gallons water

Directions

Make the beer

Boil the sugar and hops in water in a covered pot for 45 minutes.
Strain the liquid and ferment it in the usual manner.

Rest and serve

Keep it for a week or ten days before using.

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.

Sugar + hopstop 43% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together6 recipes

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

Coarse brown sugar: Provides the fermentable sugar that yeast turns into alcohol and carbonation.
Hops: Adds bitterness and aroma that balance the sweetness of the sugar.

“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.