Skip to main content
Drink

Hop Beer

A fermented beverage made from hops, molasses, eggs, and water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Molasses and egg are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 34% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 6,879 recipes. The science ↓

Hop Beer

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Place the hops in a bag and boil them in 3 pails full of water for 15 minutes.

  2. Add the molasses while the mixture is hot and pour it into a strong ale cask that is airtight.

  3. Add the remaining cold water and let the mixture cool.

  4. Once cool, add the eggs.

  5. Store in a warm place to ferment; it will keep for 6 to 8 months.

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. Molasses + eggtop 34% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together6,879 recipes
  2. Hops + molassestop 41% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together5 recipes
  3. Hops + eggtop 42% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together5 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

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

What each ingredient does

Hops
Adds bitterness and aroma that balance the sweetness of the molasses.
Molasses
Supplies sugars for fermentation and adds sweetness and dark, rich flavour.

The step that matters

Add the eggs only once the mixture has cooled. Eggs added to hot liquid can cook and curdle rather than mix in smoothly, so the mixture must be cool first.

“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.

You might also like