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Drink

Treacle Beer

Treacle beer is a fermented beverage made by mixing treacle with water, yeast, and optionally hops and malt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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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 ↓

Treacle Beer

Ingredients

Directions

Make the wort

  1. In a large pot, combine 2 quarts of boiling water with 1 pound of treacle and stir until well mixed.

  2. Add 6 to 8 quarts of cold water and 1 teacupful of yeast to the mixture.

Ferment and store

  1. Transfer the mixture into a cask and cover it with a coarse cloth folded several times.

  2. Let it sit for 2 to 3 days until it is ready to drink.

  3. For bottling, follow the same steps and use the bottoms of the beer as yeast for future batches.

  4. If making a large quantity for storage, add a handful of hops and a handful of malt, then seal it tightly after fermentation.

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
Provides the sugar that the yeast ferments, and the dark sweetness and flavour of the beer.
Yeast
Converts the sugars into alcohol and carbonation during fermentation.
Hops
Add bitterness and aroma, and help preserve the beer when used for storage.

“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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