Skip to main content
Drink

Treacle Beer

Treacle beer is a fermented beverage made with treacle, ginger, water, yeast, and optionally brown sugar.

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

Why it works: Ginger and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 17% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,054 recipes. Both carry 1-penten-3-one, which smells fish, pungent. The science ↓

Treacle Beer

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Pour hot water over treacle to dissolve it.

  2. Boil bruised ginger in 2 quarts of water for 15-20 minutes.

Mix and ferment

  1. Add cold water to the ginger mixture and mix well.

  2. Strain the liquor from the ginger and add yeast.

  3. Bottle the mixture once it becomes frothy, leaving it uncorked for 24 hours.

  4. Optionally, add brown sugar 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. Ginger + sugartop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together14,054 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

Ginger and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 14,054 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

Treacle
Provides sugar that the yeast ferments and adds rich, dark sweetness and body.
Yeast
Ferments the sugars, producing alcohol and carbon dioxide that carbonates the beer.
Bruised ginger
Adds aromatic, spicy flavour to the liquor.

The step that matters

Bottle the mixture once it becomes frothy. Fermentation is active when the mixture is frothy. Bottling at the right point matters because yeast keeps producing carbon dioxide in sealed bottles, so bottling too early or too late affects carbonation and bottle pressure.

“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

Ginger PopGinger Pop22 recipesGinger WineGinger Wine12 recipesGinger BeerGinger Beer11 recipesGinger TeaGinger Tea9 recipes