sweetwort

sweet wort, sweet-wort

From sweet +‎ wort.

sweetwort (plural sweetworts)

1. (Can we verify⁽⁺⁾ this sense?) Any of a variety of sweet-tasting plants.
   • 1855, Daniel Smith, The Reformed Botanic and Indian Physician, page 383:

     […] then boil the buds or bark of elder, sweetwort and green brier leaves

   • 1889, Leo Tolstoy, translated by Nathan Haskell Dole, War and peace, published 1898, page 300:

     As spring opened, they began to find a plant just showing above the ground; it resembled asparagus, and for some reason they called it " Mashka's sweetwort," though it was very bitter

   • 1947, Olive Percival, Our Old-fashioned Flowers, page 208:

     Sweetwort, Acorus calamus

   • 1969, “Soviet Literature”, in (Please provide the book title or journal name), numbers 1-6, page 66:

     the hay from upland meadows, with its larger variety of plants, predominantly origanum, a modest plant with pink and white flowers. It is this sweetwort that makes the aroma of hay mown and dried in fine weather exceptionally spicy and exhilarating.

2. An fermented beverage made from malt.
   • 2024, Jill L. Baker, Culinary Technology of the Ancient Near East, page 2018:

     It is you who hold with both hands the great sweetwort, brewing it with honey and wine.

3. A sugar-rich liquid, as that used in fermentation.
   • 1884, T. Jeffery Parker, “Bacteria”, in The New Zealand Journal of Science, volume 2, number 2, page 52:

     In Alcoholic fermentation yeast is added to some saccharine fluid—such as the "sweetwort" or infusion of malt used in the preparation of beer.

   • 1885, Edward T. Blakely, A Popular Technical Dictionary of Commercial and General Information, 2 edition, page 32:

     Barley-sugar. A preparation of sugar made in long yellow sticks, which were flavoured originally with sweetwort, or extract of malt, but now flavoured with lemon.

   • 1885, William Mattieu Williams, The Chemistry of Cookery, page 97:

     Neither the juice of the beetroot nor the sap of the sugar-cane consists entirely of pure sugar dissolved in pure water. They both contain other constituents common to vegetable juices, and some peculiar to themselves. These mucilaginous matters, when roughly separated, carry down with them some sugar, and form a sort of sweetwort, capable by skilful treatment of producing a rich caramel well suited for mixing with coffee.

   • 1896, Joseph Lister, “Inter-dependence of Scienxe and the Healing Art”, in The Lancet:

     Cagniard-Latour had indeed shown several years before that yeast consists essentially of the cells of a microscopic fungus which grows as the sweetwort ferments, and he had attributed the breaking up of the sugar into alcohol and carbonic acid to the growth of the micro-organism.

   • 1999, Mark Braunstein, “Sprout Sweets”, in Sprout Garden:Indoor Grower's Guide to Gourmet Sprouts, page 122:

     If allowed to ferment, you have brewed beer. As it is, Sweetwort is sweet (what's in a name) and non-alcoholic.

• “sweetwort”, in OneLook Dictionary Search.