Skip to main content
Drink

Malt Wine

A fermented beverage made by boiling water with sugar, adding ale wort, raisins, brandy, and isinglass, then aging for a year.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Wort and brandy work together. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 18 recipes. Both carry phenethyl acetate, which smells rose, honey. The science ↓

Malt Wine

Ingredients

Directions

Make the wine

  1. Boil 6 gallons of water with 30 pounds of loaf sugar for 30 minutes.

  2. Skim the mixture when it is lukewarm.

  3. Add 2 quarts of ale wort for every 3 quarts of the mixture.

  4. Let it stand to work for 2 days.

Cask and age

  1. Cask it with 1 pound of sugar-candy, 4 pounds of raisins, 1 quart of brandy, and 2 ounces of isinglass.

  2. Let it stand for 1 year before bottling.

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. Wort + brandytop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenethyl acetate (rose, honey).

  2. Raisin + brandytop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,768 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

  3. Sugar + raisintop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,481 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

  4. Wort + raisintop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together16 recipes

    Shared aroma: gamma-nonanolactone (coconut, creamy).

  5. Sugar + brandytop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together11,939 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

Sugar and brandy barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 11,939 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Loaf sugar
Provides the fermentable sugar that yeast converts into alcohol.
Ale wort
Supplies yeast and nutrients to start the fermentation.
Raisins
Add fruit sugars and flavor to the wine as it ages.
Brandy
Raises the alcohol content and helps preserve the wine.
Isinglass
Acts as a fining agent that helps clear the wine as it settles.

The step that matters

Adding the ale wort to the cooled mixture. If the liquid is still hot, it can kill the yeast in the wort, so the fermentation may fail to start. Skimming and cooling to lukewarm first keeps the yeast active.

“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

Raisin WineRaisin Wine64 recipesVegetable SoupVegetable Soup350 recipesRaspberry VinegarRaspberry Vinegar214 recipesBrown Coffee with EggBrown Coffee with Egg175 recipes