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Wicklow Ale

A traditional Irish ale brewed with pale malt, hops, and a two‑step mash process.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
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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

Directions

Prepare

  1. Combine 6 bushels of coarsely ground pale malt with 2 pounds of hops in a large brewing vessel.

Mash and brew

  1. For the first mash, add 1 barrel of cold water to every 4 barrels of boiling water in the copper as it begins to boil.

  2. For the second mash, add 1 barrel of cold water to every 6 barrels of boiling water.

  3. Allow the mixture to brew for 2 hours for each mash.

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. 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
Provides the sugars that yeast later ferments, and the main body of the ale.
Hops
Adds bitterness and aroma that balance the malt's sweetness.

The step that matters

Adding the cold water to the boiling water. Cold water is mixed into the boiling water to bring the mash to a workable temperature. Adding it in the stated ratio matters because the mash temperature controls how well the malt's starches convert to fermentable sugars.

“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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