Name: How to Manage Four Bushels of Malt
Ingredients: 4 bushels pale malt; 36 gallons water at 182°F (83°C); 58 gallons water at 190°F (88°C); 2 pounds hops; ½ pound hops; sugar (as needed)

Why it works: Malt and sugar work together. They rank in the top 17% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 325 recipes. Both carry beta-damascenone, which smells apple, rose. The science ↓

How to Manage Four Bushels of Malt

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 182°F (83°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Mash and sparge

Mash 4 bushels of pale malt with 36 gallons of water at 182°F (83°C).
Cover and let it sit for 2.5 hours.
Draw off the mash into the underback when the surface appears.
Sparge with 58 gallons of water at 190°F (88°C) until you have about 38 gallons of wort.

Boil and hop

Boil the strong-ale wort with 2 pounds of hops for 45 minutes.
Add another ½ pound of hops and boil for an additional 30 minutes.

Cool and divide

Cool some wort to 60°F (16°C) before drawing off.
Check its strength with a saccharometer.
Draw off 7 gallons for table-beer wort.
Add sugar to the remaining 20 gallons to reach a gravity of 115 for Edinburgh ale.

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.

Malt + sugartop 17% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together325 recipes

Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).
Hops + sugartop 43% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together6 recipes

Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).
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

Pale malt: Provides the fermentable sugars that make up the wort and body of the beer.
Hops: Add bitterness that balances the malt sweetness and contribute aroma to the beer.
Sugar: Raises the gravity of the remaining wort, adding fermentable sugars for the Edinburgh ale.

“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.