Wine from the Yeast Cakes
Now that the yeast cakes are ready , and nice and dry (they firmed up quite nicely after drying), I'm ready to start making wine from them. Qimin Yaoshu is structured around the yeast cakes, and to help keep them straight, I'm numbering them and the wines that are attached to each cake recipe. These yeast cakes are the first "exceptional" yeast cakes, so I'm calling them YE1, and below are the translated directions to make two different wines using them, a millet wine (YE1W1) and a rice wine (YE1W2). I'm starting the process of making these now, and I'll report back once I have some more photos to show. For sizing, the recipe clearly tells us that one volume of yeast cakes is enough for 21 or 18 volumes of grain, which means something like 60 volumes of alcohol, if you figure that you get about as much liquid out as cooked grain, which is about three times the volume of the dry grain. Since I'm making this to hopefully panel at ...