Rice Wine

[SmokesAhoy]

Before anyone asks, not sake. All sake is rice wine but not all rice wine is sake. This would be the equivalent of farmhouse rice wine that nearly every Asian country has an example of. This is an easy wine that uses 4 things:

Rice (I've experimented and the only types that don't work are the common long grain rice and the uncle Ben's style of parboiled rice. The shorter the grain, the higher the polish the better the wine)
Water
Yeast balls (a. oryzae+yeast+god knows what)
Red yeast rice (optional, m. purpureus is basically the parent of lovastatin so if on statins omit)


Step 1: prepare rice. For this big a batch I find it easier to do away with more traditional ways of making rice and instead boil the water then add the rice stirring constantly until the water begins to come back to a boil, then drop the temperature to low returning the lid to the pot. After 20 or so minutes turn the pot off and allow rice to come to room temp over night.





The next day add your mix of rice balls and ryr. I powder this mix at 3 rice balls and 1 cup ryr, then sprinkle one heaping tablespoon all over the top of the rice.





Upend your cook pot over the Homer bucket so it slides out in one big chunk of rice, with the powder you added on the bottom now.

Add another heaping tablespoon of powder to the top of the rice in the Homer bucket.


Stab the top once the powder has been distributed over the surface, this drives the mould spores into the middle of the mass of rice.


Date your bucket, seal the lid, take a thumb tack and poke 5 or so holes in the center of the lid. Put somewhere 70 degrees for a month. Don't check it, don't stir it don't even think about it.

After a month it's done


Take the bucket out and pour into another bucket with a 5 gal paint strainer bag in place.


Pick the bag up to separate the wine from the unconverted rice, squeezing where necessary.

Bottle up.


This rice wine is ready to drink immediately, if left for too long you'd want to pasteurize it to avoid a lacto ferment from souring it, some people like to let it sour, I drink it before that.

The water to rice ratio controls the sweetness, I like 1 gallon water to 5 lbs rice, it's a nice in between I find.

 

[SmokesAhoy]

This process has a lot of variables, outside a lab it's pretty hard to duplicate a batch, but very easy to get them similar. Less water means when the alcohol finally kills the yeast there is still sugar left and a sweet wine. More water allows the alcohol to stay below killing levels and convert more sugar. Due to the parallel process of the mould producing different amylase enzymes which cleave the carb chains into glucose chains slowly the yeast is never inundated with sugar, so it slowly rises the alcohol to really high levels before finally stopping.

All ingredients come from Asian stores. I have none so I buy the place out of rice balls every time I'm in CT. If you want to you can propagate the moulds. It was worth it to do that with the a. oryzae back when I was making sake, but the balls are less than a dollar for the 3 pack so just not worth it.

Flavor: I've had some come out tasting like a strawberry banana pineapple mix drink, some like a fruity yogurt drink. It's variable.

American style long grain rice does not work really. Enzymes can't seem to find the starch, it makes a low alcohol yogurt consistency, flavor drink, too thick.

Between my wife and I we go through a gallon in about a week, so I keep 4 buckets in rotation. First time you try it, it's a little odd. Strawberry banana from mould you say? By the time you finish the batch you're addicted. There is enough variation brought on by temperature, water %, how the mould worked etc, that it never really gets old.

 

[Rectifier]

A. oryzae is a fascinating organism, which enables fermentation of all manner of starches without requiring malts. Great for producing alcohol on-farm without purchased malt or the fussy and time-consuming step of malting your own grain.

We considered playing with it for awhile for an experiment in ethanol fuel and/or white lightning as it will ferment corn as well. Run it through a column and distill it to the azeotrope and it's just another vodka. In the end of course, we didn't have time for this particular experiment.

That said, you actually enjoy drinking this stuff? Undistilled? My wife is from Asia and I still shudder to think of when I had to drink rice wine while visiting her family...

 

[SmokesAhoy]

Love it, I was basically raised Asian though, and my wife is very open minded. I let my neighbor try it and he probably felt how you do, didn't stop him from finishing the bottle though hehe.

 

[Rectifier]

Heh, that's why they say "to each their own" I suppose. I myself grew up on the coast in an Asian community.

As such I'll eat just about any animal or part of an animal, and I'll pickle or can anything that stands still long enough to shove in a jar. I've fermented all manner of things, and we used to drink kefir everyday until my kefir grain was lost in a move. That thing is also a "god knows what" polyculture of fungi/bacteria/yeast. In warm milk that's been left out overnight.

Never could get in to that rice wine, though. My tastes in alcohol are on the other end of the spectrum, I suppose. I like scotch whisky, smokey porters and stouts so black they block out the sun

 

[DistillingJim]

Excellent

 

[SmokesAhoy]

You sound like you are writing about me. Weird. I like all that crap too. You're just missing the rice wine gene

Would you post your in-laws recipe/process too? I'm always excited to learn something new. This is more Chinese choujiu, I know the Koreans make makgeoli which is similar, and even the Japanese have a batch that is like this called doburuku.

Adding the red yeast rice makes it a bit fruity.

 

[Rectifier]

They are from Taiwan, and her parents are about as city folk as it gets. She's the opposite, lives out here in the hills with me. They only purchase the stuff, which might be the problem - maybe the homebrew is of better flavour. Taiwan is influenced by so many sources, but in this I think they take after Japan. It's either a clear drink much like sake or a white cloudy one, and I just drank what I was served and didn't ask too many questions!

I never saw it red, that's for sure!

 

[ChinaVoodoo]

I can get this yeast from the shop down the street. I'll have to call them to see if they have the koji.
https://www.wyeastlab.com/yeast-strain/sake

 

[Leftynick]

I made a couple of batch of rice wine last year, one red and one white. Couldn't stomach both. It's weird, few years back, i done a really good rice wine, following the native variation of the recipe and failed to emulate it ever since. They are called tuak, or lihing. There are many taboo on making them, some completely nonsense such as you have to be completely naked when making them, but i never followed them. Maybe I should though, considering my failure.

 

[SmokesAhoy]

The koji will only do the alpha amylase, the yeast balls have multiple molds producing a more complete conversion. If you go the koji route just use the package as seed. To propagate, soak Japanese short grain rice overnight in water after rinsing thoroughly. Place in cloth lined colander inside pressure cooker and cook like 20 minutes.
Mix koji with the room temp steamed rice and try to get most of the grains separated in a thin sheet inside a cooler for insulation. The mould will grow across the media, then as the media dries out will sporolate.

I find it too hard to just collect the spores so I let the whole mass dry down and powder everything.

I've never tried making this kind of rice wine with just the koji, and yeast. if you end up doing it let us know what you think of the taste

 

[ChinaVoodoo]

The koji will only do the alpha amylase, the yeast balls have multiple molds producing a more complete conversion. If you go the koji route just use the package as seed. To propagate, soak Japanese short grain rice overnight in water after rinsing thoroughly. Place in cloth lined colander inside pressure cooker and cook like 20 minutes.
Mix koji with the room temp steamed rice and try to get most of the grains separated in a thin sheet inside a cooler for insulation. The mould will grow across the media, then as the media dries out will sporolate.

I find it too hard to just collect the spores so I let the whole mass dry down and powder everything.

I've never tried making this kind of rice wine with just the koji, and yeast. if you end up doing it let us know what you think of the taste

Well, my favorite sake is the unfiltered nigori sake, and when I read about it, they only mentioned koji, so when I get around to it, I'll probably try.

 

[SmokesAhoy]

In case you haven't seen this yet, it's a good guide on sake

www.taylor-madeak.org