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Drink

Birch Wine

Birch wine is a fermented beverage made from birch sap, sugar or honey, hops, and optional spices.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Clove and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 10% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,150 recipes. Both carry eucalyptol, which smells eucalyptus, herbal. The science ↓

Birch Wine

Ingredients

Directions

Collect the sap

  1. In March, drill a hole in each birch tree about one foot from the ground and insert a faucet to collect sap in a vessel for 2-3 days.

  2. Once you have enough sap, plug the holes with pegs.

Make and ferment the wine

  1. In a pot, combine the birch sap with sugar or honey and boil for 1 hour, stirring well.

  2. Add hops, and optionally, cloves and lemon rind for flavor.

  3. Cool the mixture and add yeast to start fermentation.

  4. Transfer to a fermentation vessel and let it sit for two months.

Bottle and age

  1. After two months, draw off the wine and bottle it.

  2. Allow the wine to age for another two months before consuming, though it will improve with longer storage.

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. Clove + lemontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,150 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  2. Sugar + lemontop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

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

  3. Sugar + clovetop 26% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together17,182 recipes

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

  4. Hops + clovetop 33% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  5. Hops + lemontop 40% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together3 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

Sugar and lemon 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

Birch sap
Provides the base liquid and the fermentable material for the wine.
Sugar or honey
Supplies the sugars that yeast converts into alcohol during fermentation.
Hops
Adds bitterness that balances the sweetness and helps preserve the wine.
Yeast
Converts the sugars into alcohol and carbon dioxide during fermentation.

The step that matters

Boil the sap with sugar or honey for 1 hour. Boiling concentrates the sap and sterilises the liquid, killing wild microbes that could spoil the wine before the added yeast takes hold. Stirring well keeps the sugar dissolved and prevents scorching on the bottom of the pot.

Swap the clove

The recipe marks clove as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sugar, hops, lemon):

  1. Gingerfits better
  2. Cinnamonfits better
  3. Nutmegfits better
  4. Clovethe original

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