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To Cure Ropy Beer

A remedy to cure beer that has become ropy, using mustard, chalk, and oyster shells.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Mustard and beer work together. They rank in the top 11% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 314 recipes. Both carry guaiacol, which smells smoky, sweet. The science ↓

To Cure Ropy Beer

Ingredients

Directions

Treat the beer

  1. Mix 1 spoonful of mustard with a little beer.

  2. Pour the mixture into the bung-hole of the cask.

  3. Wait one day for the beer to be fit for use.

Correct sourness

  1. If the beer is sour, hang a linen bag in the cask with equal amounts of pounded chalk and calcined oyster shells.

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. Mustard + beertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together314 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  2. Mustard + oystertop 22% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together279 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-methylbutyraldehyde (malty, chocolate).

  3. Beer + oystertop 23% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together26 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,6-nonadienal (cucumber, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Mustard
Its compounds are offered here as the agent that works against the ropy texture of the beer.
Pounded chalk
Calcium carbonate that can neutralise acidity, reducing the sourness of the beer.
Calcined oyster shells
Calcined shell is mostly calcium oxide, an alkaline material that neutralises acidity in the beer.

The step that matters

Hanging the linen bag of chalk and shells. Chalk and calcined shells are alkaline and neutralise acid. Only add the bag if the beer is actually sour, because the alkali changes the balance of the beer and cannot be undone once it has acted.

Swap the mustard

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beer, oyster):

  1. Horseradishfits better
  2. Cucumberfits better
  3. Mustardthe original
  4. Tomatofits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against beer, oyster. 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.

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