Why it works: Malt and hops work together. They rank in the top 49% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1 recipes. Both carry guaiacol, which smells smoky, sweet. The science ↓
Ale, Home-brewed
Ingredients
Directions
The book gives no oven temperature. The 170°F (77°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.
Mash
Heat 18 gallons of water to 170°F (77°C).
Pour half the water over the ground malt and mix well.
Cover the vessel and let it sit for 1 hour (1.5 hours if cold).
If using hard water, boil it and let it cool to 165°F (74°C) before adding to the malt.
After the first infusion, draw off the wort into another vessel.
Pour the second half of the water over the malt and let it mash for 1 hour.
Boil and cool
Boil the first wort with ½ lb of hops for 1 hour.
Draw off the second mash and boil it with ¼ lb of fresh hops for 30 minutes.
Mix the two liquors and cool to 60°F (15°C).
Ferment and cask
Stir in 1 pint of yeast and allow fermentation to complete.
Draw off the ale into a cask rinsed with boiling water.
After fermentation slows, loosely bung the cask for 2 days, then fasten the bung.
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.
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Malt + hopstop 49% of all pairsSmell alikelowCooked 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
- Ground malt
- Provides the sugars that yeast ferments into alcohol, and body to the ale.
- Hops
- Adds bitterness and aroma that balance the sweetness of the malt.
- Yeast
- Ferments the sugars in the wort into alcohol and carbon dioxide.
The step that matters
Mash temperature and timing. Water near 170°F with the malt for the full hour lets enzymes convert starch into fermentable sugars. Water that is too hot can denature them, leaving a weaker, less fermentable wort.
“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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