Name: Wicklow Ale
Ingredients: 6 bushels pale malt, coarsely ground; 2 pounds hops; 4 barrels boiling water; 1 barrel cold water (for first mash); 1 barrel cold water (for second mash)

Why it works: Malt and hops 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 ↓

Wicklow Ale

Ingredients

6 bushels pale malt, coarsely ground
2 pounds hops
4 barrels boiling water
1 barrel cold water (for first mash)
1 barrel cold water (for second mash)

Directions

Prepare the water

Boil 4 barrels of water in a copper.

Mash and brew

For the first mash, add 1 barrel of cold water to every 4 barrels of boiling water.
For the second mash, add 1 barrel of cold water to every 6 barrels of boiling water.
Add the pale malt and hops to the mixture and proceed with brewing.

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.

Malt + hopstop 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

Pale malt: Supplies starch that enzymes convert into fermentable sugars during mashing.
Hops: Adds bitterness and aroma that balance the malt's sweetness.

“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.