Literature. Drinking. 【文飲】

Having just made new yeast cakes , I put them to good use in a batch of millet wine and rice wine following the recipe I call YE1W1 and YE2W2, as they're the first and second wines (W1, W2) listed under the first exceptional yeast cakes (YE1).  They came out really good! The recipe: Millet or Rice Wine à la Yuán Púshè This volume will fit in a 1 gallon wide-mouthed fermenter, barely. Ingredients and Tools ¼ cup powdered exceptional yeast cakes, about one cake.  But do measure. 5.25 cups dry millet or 4.5 cups dry white sticky rice Water 1 gallon, wide-mouthed fermenter - cooked grain can’t go through a narrow mouth Cheesecloth Optionally, liner silk or some other filter fabric finer than your cheesecloth Mortar and pestle Directions Dry the yeast cakes completely and scrub them clean several times. Grate, and then grind the yeast cakes in a mortar.  Soak them in 1.25 cups water for three days until they start to bubble.  Add to...

Pennsic was a whirlwind of activity, and despite me promising to update this blog "real soon I promise" life got in the way. I think this is a good time to take inventory of what I've figured out over the past year or so.  There are a lot of unanswered questions, but I've made a ton of progress nailing down this process. Yeast Cakes I've got a recipe for "exceptional" yeast cakes that worked once, last year. I tried to make it a month ago and it rotted 😑 But hey, it worked once. I also learned that the warning about "don't store this in a sealed container or it'll turn black and get gross" wasn't kidding, since my cakes did just that.  Mr. Jia wasn't joking, apparently. The recipe as I handed it out at Pennsic is posted at the bottom. Brewing I made one rice wine for Pennsic that was delightful.  Sweet, dark, saucy, it was great.  I didn't get to panel it, sadly.  I made one short-wine a while ago ...

I'm trying to get a short wine recipe to work, but it's tricky. One of the problems is how long to incubate the yeast cakes before using them.  The recipe says: 浸麴發如魚眼湯。 Soak the yeast cakes until they bubble with bubbles the size of fish eyes. And so I waited for bubbles.  They never came, and one day when I checked on the brew... Sadness.  It's covered in a slick of fungus. This work is licensed under a  Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License . 

Chinese grain wines are fermented on the mash, which means that if you want to get something drinkable out the other end, you need to separate the grain from the liquor. I initially was assuming this was happening without firm evidence, because the fermented mash is not wine by any means. Blorp I've used cheesecloth with some success to filter it, but it's a little difficult because you have to squeeze it pretty hard to get the wine out, or else sensuously massage the bag of mash with your hands to allow it to continue draining.  I think that it's hard to drain because the grain particles are pretty fine, and clog up the filter.  Beer mashes can run into this problem occasionally, but don't usually because they're less porridge-like since the grain isn't cooked. Straining through cheesecloth has been what I've been doing, but you still end up with a lot  of sediment coming out of the bag. Some of this sediment will settle out, particularly...

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  ...

I wanted to find a recipe that didn't require seven batches of grain, so I started on another short recipe elsewhere in scroll seven. I didn't translate the process for making the yeast cakes because I'm not going to make them, although it seems to be similar to the process for the lumpy yeast cakes I translated earlier, using the same grain mixture. As usual, each sentence in Chinese is followed by my translation in English. 釀白醪法：取糯米一石，冷水淨淘，漉出著甕中，作魚眼沸湯浸之。To make white young wine: take one dan of glutinous rice (Oryza sativa var. glutinosa) , rinse it in cold water until clean, strain it and put it in a weng, and soak it in water boiling with bubbles like fish eyes. 經一宿，米欲絕酢，炊作一餾飯，攤令絕冷。Pass one night, and the rice should be decidedly sour; steam it, and once it’s cooked spread it out to cool. 取魚眼湯沃浸米泔二斗，煎取六升，著甕中，以竹掃衝之，如茗渤。Take two dou of the water from rinsing the rice, and boil it with bubbles like fish eyes down to six sheng (0.6 dou), put it in the weng, then t...

I spent last week attending Pennsic , and brought my lumpy yeast cake wine to the Arts and Sciences display, as well as the inter-kingdom brewing competition and the East kingdom brewers' guild panel.  What a blast!  Getting to share this weird beverage with so many people was really fun, especially since some people actually liked it, and some people really hated it. About 60 people came by my booth at the A&S display and tried the millet wine, consuming a little over half a gallon.  What I didn't know at the beginning is that the wine settles out very quickly, so by the end of the display, I was pouring something the consistency of pancake batter.  The flavor didn't change much, so I suspect that the heavy notes of bread are coming from the suspended yeast.  More study is needed to figure out what the flavor is like after letting it settle for a few weeks. I got a lot of great feedback at the brewing competitions.  Of course, I'd really love t...

The past two posts  are my pretty literal translations of the recipe for lumpy yeast cake wine.  I'm going to try to make this, and it's convenient to have a plain English recipe to follow. I haven't tried it yet, although I have purchased some millet and some commercial yeast balls to give it a try, and I've signed up for the arts and sciences display at Pennsic , so I'd better have something to show! I'm assuming that one dan ( 石) is 100L, one dou ( 斗) is 10L, and that one hu ( 斛) is 50L. Lumpy Yeast Cake Wine A dry, strong millet wine. For vessels totalling 7000L.  Scale down (or up, for the adventurous) as appropriate. Ingredients: 900L of Proso millet ( Panicum miliaceum ) , divided as follows into seven charges: 200L 170L 140L 110L 100L 90L 90L Additional perhaps 100L millet on standby to adjust quantities during brewing. 130L of lumpy yeast cakes (1/7 the amount of grain) 400L water (this might actually be seven t...