Skip to main content
Drink

Burton Ale

A beer brewed with treacle, hops, and malt, boiled for an hour and aged for 3 to 4 months.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Hops and malt 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 ↓

Burton Ale

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Boil the wort for 1 hour without stopping.

  2. Add 6 pounds of treacle to the copper during boiling.

  3. Stir the mixture continuously, especially from the bottom.

  4. Add ¾ pound of hops for every bushel of malt.

  5. Tap the ale after 3 to 4 months for best flavor.

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 + malttop 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

Treacle
Adds sweetness and dark colour, and its sugars feed fermentation for body and flavour.
Hops
Add bitterness that balances the sweetness and contributes aroma and preservative character.
Malt
Provides the fermentable sugars and body that form the base of the ale.

The step that matters

Stir continuously, especially from the bottom. Sugary worts scorch and stick to the bottom of the copper during a long boil. Constant stirring keeps the mixture moving and prevents burnt flavours.

“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