Report on Hakka Traditional Brewing

Hakkas moved south from the Central Plains and moved to Gannan. Most of them live in mountainous areas and have a hard life. At that time, the mountainous areas with dense virgin forests were cold and humid, and miasma was serious. In order to drive away the cold and avoid miasma, we changed our traditional hobby of drinking white wine and used our own glutinous rice to brew rice wine. Brewing is simple, and every household can brew it by itself and pass it on from generation to generation.

Hakka rice wine can be divided into four kinds: Shuijiu, Jiu Shao, glutinous rice wine and Fujiu wine, and the production techniques of the four kinds of rice wine are different.

Water wine is made by cleaning glutinous rice, soaking it in clear water for a long time, ladling the soaked glutinous rice into a rice cooker, steaming it with strong fire, pouring the steamed glutinous rice on a dustpan, fully spreading it for cooling or washing it with clean cold water, then grinding medicinal liquor (also called wine cake and distiller's yeast), mixing it with cold water, compacting it in an urn, drilling a small "wine well" in the center, and covering it with heat preservation. After a few days, there were more and more distiller's grains in the jar. The original distiller's grains pit was loose, that is, it was mixed with water for a day, and then a wine basket was squeezed and filtered to separate the wine from the distiller's grains. Squeeze, filter or wrap gauze to squeeze out the water wine, put it in the jar, put it in the corner of the yard, pile bran around the jar, smoke it out with a torch and simmer it for three or four hours.

You can also directly separate the wine from the distiller's grains after the fermented grains ooze, add water to the extruded wine, put it in an urn, seal the jar mouth, and stew it in chaff fire until it boils. Also, when the jar is infiltrated with wine, a proper amount of white wine, rock sugar or white sugar is added, and the jar mouth is sealed to make honey wine.

Soju is made by soaking rice, washing it, steaming it in a rice cooker with strong fire, spreading it after steaming, mixing it with medicinal liquor, fermenting in a jar, adding a proper amount of water after fermentation for a few days, putting it in a jar for a few days, and then distilling and cooling it to make soju.

Glutinous rice wine is one of the traditional brewed foods in urban and rural areas of southern Jiangxi. It takes high-quality glutinous rice as raw material, saccharifies the starter with medicated wine, and adopts the traditional process of rice washing, rice steaming, cooling, medicated wine, bibimbap, unloading the jar, and fermenting into wine, which has short fermentation time. Glutinous rice wine is not old, not stale, sour, slag-melting, sweet but not greasy, and has a strong aroma.

Fu wine is made of high-quality glutinous rice as the main raw material and koji as sugar koji. Sweet yellow rice wine is made by rice washing, rice washing, rice steaming, cooling, medicated wine, bibimbap, unloading the jar and long-term fermentation. This wine is produced in winter and spring every year, and it can only be drunk after years of aging in summer and autumn, so it is also called aged wine. The longer the time, the more transparent the color and the moderate brown.

(Editor/"Wine and Food Style" TOMLI)