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Root Beer

Root beer made by boiling hops and roots, adding spruce and sassafras oils, yeast, and molasses or sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Burdock and dock share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 22 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Root Beer

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the brew

  1. Bruise the hops and roots.

  2. Boil the bruised ingredients in 1 gallon of water for 20 minutes.

  3. Strain the mixture while hot.

Flavour and ferment

  1. Add the oils of spruce and sassafras when the mixture is cool enough to handle.

  2. Stir in the yeast and molasses or sugar.

  3. Let the mixture stand in a jar covered with a cloth for 2 hours.

Bottle

  1. Bottle the beer and store it in a cool place.

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. Burdock + docktop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together22 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Dock + dandeliontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together25 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Burdock + dandeliontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together25 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Burdock + molassestop 25% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together17 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  5. Dock + molassestop 31% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together12 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

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

What each ingredient does

Yeast
Ferments the sugars, producing carbonation and the beer's fizz.
Molasses or white sugar
Provides the fermentable sugar that yeast converts into alcohol and carbonation.
Hops
Adds bitterness and aroma that balance the sweetness of the brew.
Sarsaparilla root
Contributes the characteristic root flavour of the beer.

The step that matters

Strain the mixture while hot, then wait for it to cool before adding the oils. Oils of spruce and sassafras are volatile and can be driven off by excess heat, so adding them only once the mixture is cool enough to handle keeps their aroma in the finished brew.

“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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