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Alterative Beer of Our Grandmother's Make

A fermented herbal beverage made from ginger, sassafras, wild cherry bark, burdock root, dandelion root, and other ingredients.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Burdock and dandelion share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 25 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Alterative Beer of Our Grandmother's Make

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the brew

  1. Bruise the ginger root, sassafras bark, wild cherry bark, burdock root, and dandelion root.

  2. Boil the bruised ingredients with 2 gallons of water for 10 minutes.

  3. Strain the mixture and add 1.5 lbs of white sugar and the lemon rind.

  4. Heat and stir until the sugar dissolves.

Ferment

  1. Pour into a stone jar and add 3 oz of tartaric acid.

  2. When lukewarm, stir in 1 teacup of hop yeast.

  3. Let it sit for a few days until it ferments and becomes a pleasant beer.

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Dandelion + lemontop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together57 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Ginger + lemontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,154 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  4. Ginger + cherrytop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together293 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  5. Ginger + burdocktop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together10 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetic acid (sour, vinegar).

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

What each ingredient does

Hop yeast
Starts fermentation, converting the sugar into carbonation and alcohol to make the beer.
White sugar
Feeds the yeast, providing the fermentable sugar that becomes alcohol and carbonation.
Tartaric acid
Adds sharp acidity that brightens the flavour and helps balance the sweetness.
Jamaica ginger root
Supplies the main spicy, aromatic flavour of the beer.

The step that matters

Stir in the yeast when lukewarm. Yeast is killed by high heat, so adding it to liquid that is still hot can stop fermentation. Waiting until the liquid is lukewarm lets the yeast survive and start working.

Swap the cherry

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (ginger, burdock, dandelion, cream, sugar, lemon):

  1. Limefits better
  2. Orangefits better
  3. Cherrythe original
  4. Coconutfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against ginger, burdock, dandelion, cream, sugar, 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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