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Strong Beer or Ale

A recipe for brewing strong beer or ale using malt, hops, yeast, and water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Malt and beer work together. They rank in the top 14% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 55 recipes. Both carry beta-damascenone, which smells apple, rose. The science ↓

Strong Beer or Ale

Ingredients

Directions

Mash

  1. Pour hot water (not boiling) over the malt and let it infuse for 3 hours, mashing it in the first half-hour.

Boil and ferment

  1. Add the hops to the wort and boil for 2 hours once it begins to boil.

  2. Cool a pailful of the mixture and add the yeast, preparing it for the rest the next day.

  3. Cover the bung hole with paper after fermentation is complete.

Bottle and age

  1. When bottling, add 1.5 pounds of dried hops to the bung hole and seal it.

  2. Let it stand in casks for 12 months and in bottles for another 12 months before 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. Malt + beertop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together55 recipes

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

  2. Hops + beertop 42% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together0 recipes

    Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, fruity).

  3. Malt + hopstop 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

Malt
Provides the sugars that yeast ferments, and the body of the beer.
Hops
Add bitterness that balances the malt sweetness, and aroma; dried hops added at bottling add more aroma.
Yeast
Ferments the malt sugars into alcohol and carbon dioxide, giving the beer its alcohol and fizz.

The step that matters

Cool the wort before adding the yeast. Yeast is a living organism that can be killed by hot liquid. The mixture must be cooled before the yeast goes in, so the yeast can survive and start fermenting.

“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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