Tips for homemade yellow rice wine

Soak glutinous rice in water for half a day, then filter it dry, and smoke it out of the water with special wooden utensils or breathable cloth bags. Hakka people usually call glutinous rice wine koji "wine cake", and there are a lot of molds on the wine cake, which are used to ferment dried rice. The enzyme preparation contained in the wine cake can saccharify the dried glutinous rice, and the yeast will ferment the sugar into wine.

Wine cakes can be bought in the market, and wine cakes are the key to the fermentation of glutinous rice, so wine cakes have a great relationship with the quality of brewed wine, so we should choose the best wine cakes.

There are two ways to serve Koji. After the dried rice is naturally cooled, it is put into a vat, and the wine is mixed into an aqueous solution and evenly sprinkled on the dried rice. The other is to cool the dry rice with cold water, then grind the koji into powder and sprinkle it evenly on the dry rice flour.

After the koji is served, the jar is sealed and covered, and the rice is dried and fermented into wine. Dry rice is pressed in the jar, and a pit is generally pressed in the middle, which is called "Sakai", and then some distillers' yeast is sprinkled in the Sakai. After the dry rice is fermented, it will flow into the "Sakai".

After a day, the dry rice began to ferment, and the dry rice slowly softened, resulting in wine. We tasted the wine in Sakai. In summer, the weather is hot and the temperature is high. Generally, it takes about 7 to 10 days to finish the wine. It will take about half a month if the weather is cold in winter. About 30 degrees is the most suitable temperature for koji fermentation. If the temperature is not enough, cover the water tank with several layers of thick towels and clothes.

The wine directly produced by dry rice fermentation is dark in color, mellow and storable. The wine yield is about 1.2, that is, 1 kg of glutinous rice can be steamed and fermented, and finally 1 kg of two wines can be brewed.

If the distiller's grains and wine are mixed with water, and then the distiller's grains are filtered out, this yellow wine mixed with water is called "water wine", which is turbid in color and less fragrant in taste, but more supple in taste. The amount of water added to water wine is usually 1∶2.5, and the final water consumption is about 3.5 times the weight of raw glutinous rice. If the added water is higher than this standard, it is really "wine is as light as water" and it is a veritable "water wine", which is what profiteers prefer to do.

Because water is mixed with wine, it must be heated and boiled before drinking. The common method of hot wine is to put the wine into a jar made of clay, surround the jar with chaff, sawdust and broken wood, light these sundries and cook them slowly with dark fire. This process is called "baking wine" and "warming wine". If it is too much trouble to make wine like this, or if these conditions are not met, put the wine in a pot and cook it with fire.