Recipe: White Cloudy Wine

A while ago I translated this recipe, and now that I've made it a few times, it's time to give you a readable recipe.

Ingredients:

• Two parts dry glutinous (sticky) rice, divided into two equal parts.
• 0.1 parts yeast cakes (ideally white cloudy wine yeast cakes, as of yet untranslated)

Steps:

1. Thoroughly rinse half the rice, strain it, and put it, uncooked, in your fermenter.
2. Bring 1-2 parts water to a boil, and pour it over the rice until the rice is covered.
3. Cover the fermenter with a clean cloth.
4. The next day, strain out the rice, retaining the liquid.
5. Steam the rice, and spread it to cool.
6. While you steam the rice, take 0.2 parts of the liquid retained from the rice, and boil it down to 0.05 parts.  Cool it, beat it with a whisk until frothy, and put it in your fermenter.
7. Put the cooled rice, and 0.06 parts water in the fermenter.
8. Powder the yeast cakes and put them in the fermenter, and mix.
9. Cover the fermenter with a clean cloth.
10. The next day, strain out the liquid from the mash.  Discard the mash, and return the liquid to the fermenter.
11. Steam the second half of the rice, and add it, hot, to the fermenter.
12. Cover the fermenter with a clean cloth.
13. After 1-4 days, the wine should be finished.

One "part" here is 30L in the original recipe, and it also says to not scale beyond that in a single fermenter.

This recipe produces a somewhat thick, sweet, opaque white wine.  It's actually quite nice!

The process is actually somewhat similar to sake making: the liquid you drain off from the first batch of rice is full of amylase and sugar, which will help to ferment the second batch.

Pictures:

Steeping the rice in boiling water

Steamed, boiled rice.

Into the fermenter!

After fermenting.  It's very moldy, but this happens every time so I suppose it's intentional

Straining out the sugar + amylase

Steaming more rice.  My rice steaming game needs work.

Adding back the liquor

I was worried the high temperature would damage the yeast and the amylase...

But actually it worked out to 108 degrees, which is just about perfect for yeast growth.

I don't have pictures of the finished product.  The first time I made this (for the Feast of John Barleycorn), it came out with a very thick texture, but I think that must have been a one-off problem because the second batch was only slightly thick, and much sweeter.  That suggests to me that the amylase didn't do its job the first time.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.