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To Bottle Beer

Instructions for bottling beer with sugar and optional carbonate of potash to produce a sparkling beverage.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and nutmeg are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 20% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 23,364 recipes. Both carry 1-penten-3-one, which smells fish, pungent. The science ↓

To Bottle Beer

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the bottles

  1. Leave the clean, dried bottles unstopped for twelve hours.

  2. Add a piece of lump sugar to each bottle.

  3. Cork the bottles tightly with new corks.

Condition the beer

  1. Let the beer sit for four to five weeks to become fine and sparkling.

  2. If the weather is cold, place the beer in a warm room the day before drinking.

Serve

  1. Pour off the beer carefully, leaving a small amount at the bottom to avoid sediment.

  2. If the beer is hard or stale, add a few grains of Carbonate of Potash when drinking.

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. Sugar + nutmegtop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together23,364 recipes

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

Sugar and nutmeg barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 23,364 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

Lump sugar
Provides fermentable sugar that the remaining yeast turns into carbonation inside the sealed bottle.
Beer (in the method)
The liquid that matures in the bottle and becomes sparkling as it carbonates.

The step that matters

Cork the bottles tightly with new corks. Carbonation builds up as gas inside the sealed bottle. A loose cork lets the gas escape, so the beer stays flat, and a weak seal can fail under 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.

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