The sweet wine brewed in the country is particularly delicious. How is koji made?

Jiuqu, generally written as Jiuqu. It is to transplant the conidia of Aspergillus into strongly cooked white rice, and then keep warm to make hyphae grow vigorously on rice grains. This is the so-called distiller's yeast. The starch of rice is saccharified under the strong action of amylase of Aspergillus, so it has been used as the raw material of sugar together with malt since ancient times, which is used in wine, sweet wine and soybean paste. Wheat instead of rice is called wheat koji.

The main component of koji is Rhizopus or Botrytis cinerea, and other components make it granular. Sweet wine is made by saccharifying and fermenting steamed rice with sweet wine koji. The flavor and nutrition of liqueur depend on the quality of liqueur koji. Rhizopus and yeast play a major role in sweet wine koji, and Rhizopus is the main saccharifying bacteria. The production of sweet wine mainly uses amylase produced by Rhizopus to decompose glutinous rice starch into monosaccharide, dextrin and a small amount of reducing sugar and oligosaccharide, forming the unique flavor of glutinous rice sweet wine.

Simple method of making high quality sweet koji. Formula: ① fresh Polygonum cuspidatum 150-200g. When picking Polygonum hydropiper, choose tender stems and leaves with white upper part, and it is better to pick them around August of the lunar calendar. Then wash, dry and chop for later use. ② 750g of rice. Soak rice in warm water 15-20 minutes, then drain the water and knead it with your fingers until it becomes powder. ③ Choose two kinds of sweet aged sweet koji. ?

Production: Pour the rice into a mortar (a tool for threshing rice in rural areas) and sieve it with a powder sieve. When there is only half a bowl of broken rice left in the mortar, add Polygonum hydropiper and mash it together. After mashing, pour all the screened rice flour into a mortar and mash it directly. Squeeze tightly into small balls with your hands to prevent looseness. When kneading, if it is not suitable, you can add a small amount of water and knead it again. Every 0.5 kg of rice can be made into 100 grains. After the granules are finished, they can be filled with a sieve. Then grind two aged distillers' yeast into powder, sprinkle them on the newly made meatballs, cover them with a layer, gently stir them a few times, and cover them with a thick clean towel.

After fermenting for 24 hours, uncover the towel. If each ball (new distiller's yeast) grows a layer of pale white fine hair like maple sugar balls and smells delicious, it will prove that the production is successful. The last key process is wine drying. Sun for half a day in 2-3 days, in the shade for half a day, and then all day, usually about a week. The prepared koji is packed in a bag and kept dry in a quicklime jar.