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Beer, Botanic

A herbal beer made by infusing various roots and herbs in boiling water, sweetened with sugar, and fermented with yeast.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and dandelion share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 4% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 57 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Beer, Botanic

Ingredients

Directions

Infuse

  1. Infuse the herbs in boiling water for 8 hours.

Ferment and bottle

  1. Add the sugar, yeast, and burnt sugar for coloring.

  2. Set aside for 1-2 days to ferment.

  3. Bottle the beer.

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. Lemon + dandeliontop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together57 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Capsicum + lemontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together10,737 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  3. Capsicum + dandeliontop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together15 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Lemon + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  5. Capsicum + sugartop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together7,560 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

Lemon and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 53,532 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

German yeast
Ferments the sugars into alcohol and carbon dioxide, giving the beer its fizz.
Raw sugar
Feeds the yeast during fermentation, providing the sugar that becomes alcohol and carbonation.
Gentian root
Supplies a strong bitterness that balances the sweetness of the finished beer.
Dandelion root
Adds earthy, bitter flavor to the herbal infusion.
Horehound
Contributes a herbal bitterness to the infused liquid.

The step that matters

Adding the sugar and yeast. Yeast is killed by very hot liquid, so the sugar and yeast should be added only after the infusion has cooled enough not to harm them. Fermentation then converts the sugar into alcohol and carbon dioxide.

Swap the capsicum

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (lemon, dandelion, sugar):

  1. Kalefits better
  2. Beetrootfits better
  3. Spinachfits better
  4. Capsicumthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against lemon, dandelion, sugar. 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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