Name: Good Table Beer
Ingredients: 4 pounds coarse 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 ↓

Good Table Beer

Ingredients

4 pounds coarse sugar
3 ounces hops
10 gallons water

Directions

Make the beer

Boil the sugar, hops, and water together for 45 minutes.
Allow the mixture to cool and then work it as usual.

Age and serve

Let it sit for 10 days before tapping.
Taste daily to note improvement.

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 sugar: Provides the fermentable sugar that yeast turns into alcohol and carbonation.
Hops: Add 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.