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Horns Breived Beer

A barley beer brewed with ginger, treacle, hops, and distiller's barm, fermented for twelve hours.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Barley and ginger work together. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 59 recipes. Both carry decanal, which smells soap, orange peel. The science ↓

Horns Breived Beer

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the brew

  1. Boil the barley in a large pot for three hours.

  2. Boil the hops separately for about one hour.

  3. Let both mixtures cool until milk warm.

Combine and ferment

  1. Melt the treacle in a little hot water, then mix in the ginger.

  2. Combine all ingredients carefully, adding the barm last.

  3. Stir everything together, adding cold water to cool it down.

  4. Allow the mixture to ferment for twelve hours 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. Barley + gingertop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together59 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  2. Ginger + hopstop 24% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together3 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  3. Barley + hopstop 76% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together0 recipes

    Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, fruity).

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

What each ingredient does

Common barley
Provides the starches that form the base of the beer's body and sugars for fermentation.
Distiller's barm
Supplies the yeast that ferments the sugars and produces alcohol and carbonation.
Dried hops
Adds bitterness and aroma that balance the sweetness of the brew.
Treacle
Adds fermentable sugar for the yeast and a dark, rich sweetness.

The step that matters

Cooling to milk warm before adding barm. Yeast is killed by very hot liquid, so the mixture must be cooled to about body temperature before the barm is added. Adding it too early can stop fermentation before it starts.

Swap the ginger

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (barley, hops):

  1. Cinnamonfits about as well
  2. Gingerthe original
  3. Thymefits about as well
  4. Nutmegfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against barley, hops. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“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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