Proud Drunk

My rice wine gets better all the time. A week ago I made the best yet. New tricks: Give it more time. Five days is better than three, because I can't take all that much sweet. When heating it to kill the yeast, be sure to wait till it froths before stopping. I failed to do that the previous batch and had rice wine all over the kitchen upon opening a bottle. It had been continuing to ferment and when I cracked the lid it became a geyser.

I finally tried some store-bought. The kind I make is closest to what they call Nigori (cloudy) in Japanese. I had a bottle of it. It tasted just like mine but the alcohol content was way higher.

[Below, an actual picture of actual Nigorizake the way you're supposed to drink it. Don't drink it out of a jar like I do.]

But mine is definitely alcoholic. And I am slowly picking up ideas for improving it. Some things to try in the future include a kind of rice-starter used to make Japanese rice wine (as opposed to the Chinese yeast cakes I've been using), adding small amounts of lactic acid (easily done and said to boost alcohol production), and a multiple step process (adding new rice to the pot after the fermentation has got under way.)

According to this Wikipedia article on sake, making it at home has been illegal in Japan since 1905! Apparently this is one of those laws that nobody enforces anymore. They say the Encyclopedia Britannica is banned in Texas because it has information on home beer making.

Boast: My Rice Wine Works

[Note: when I use the word hooch, I don't mean distilled hooch.]

My rice wine works!

My first batch wouldn't even ferment. I threw it out when it grew mold. My second tasted the best, but it was an alcoholic dud. I now know what I did wrong. I let my yeasties breathe.

I now suffocates my yeasties always. I puts a lid on 'em and I puts a pillow on top of the lid.

I made batch #3 four days ago. It was beautiful. A full 45 ounces of creamy white rice wine brewed from what started as 4 cups of raw glutinous rice. But I was fearful. How would it taste? Would I dare drink it? I tasted a drop. I dared not drink more.

Batch #4 was done this morning. It was made with raisins as well as rice. I thought, surely, it would taste better.

My assessment: The rice wine with raisins tastes like NyQuil would have tasted at the factory before the flavoring was added to make it palatable. I returned to the raisin free batch and tasted it again, to see how it compared. It was not so good.

But then I realized I had a box of sugar. What the hell, it works for NyQuil. So I added two teaspoons of sugar to a glass of batch #3. I could drink it! I had another sweetened glass. And another.

And it worked! I made real hooch! The Wes Buzz-o-Meter says this stuff is 8% or higher!

I gave some of the sweetened hooch to Anitra. I said, "Don't you think it tastes better?"

Anitra said, "Better than what? Having steel wool scraped across my tongue?"

Success! It works and Anitra won't touch it!

Adventures with Yeast

Video Find of the Day

I have already mentioned my forays into bread-making. I will have more to say about that later -- I'm overdue with a boast pertaining to sourdough. But right now I want to mention that I have been trying to make rice wine, and after a really ugly failure two weeks ago the current experimental batch is looking and tasting great.

The stuff I'm trying to make is something called jiuniang, a so-called sweet wine made from sticky rice. What appeals to me about it is that I live upon a postage-stamp and don't have room for vats and bottles to ferment and age large quantities of drink. Therefore I need a fast turnaround. Internet sources promise turnarounds between 3 and 5 days.

So I think, "lets see, I want 60-ounces of beer per night, but the rice wine has 3 times the alcohol content, so I'm after 20 ounces per night, or about half a gallon per turnaround, which means I can do the fermenting in the 5 quart crockpot that's already taking up space."

The first batch probably failed because the 69 cent package of champagne yeast was dead. But, whoa! This second batch took off, from white wine yeast, and I've tasted it and I'm psyched. I think there's going to be 5 maybe 6 ounces of experimental 12% or so rice squeezings tomorrow! Woo, woo!

Here to celebrate is a "futuristic" drinking song from a 1930 sci-fi comedy movie. According to the description, in this vision of the future, pills have replaced hooch but they're still singing drinking songs.

Drinking Song from Just Imagine (1930)