Chinese Rice wine

With baby Bryan's EDD coming up, we've been busy making preparations for the nursery. What's more, the Chinese have an archaic confinement period during which the new mother is supposed to take various "healing foods". One of them, happily, involves brewing - Chinese rice wine!

First up, the ingredients:

• Glutinous rice (we bought 5kg of the stuff since it was on sale)
• Rice wine yeast (pictured above - sold in Chinese medicinal stores as 酒饼(jiu bing) or literally "wine cakes"). You will need 1 "wine cake" per 500 grams of uncooked rice.

Equipment:

• Weighing scale
• Rice cooker
• Fermenting vessel 
• Starsan (OK, I'm sure the traditional Chinese didn't have the benefit of Starsan, but I like my equipment clean ..)
• Motar & pestle 
• Trays / aluminum foil (for cooling the rice)

The process! First, the glutinous rice. It expands to about 2.5x its size after cooking, so take that into consideration. For our carboy, we used 1.5kg of rice.

Wash the rice thoroughly with cool water, until the water runs clear. It took us 6 rinses. Subsequently, place the rice with an inch of water covering it, and let the rice cooker do its job.

Sanitise the trays and rice ladle with Starsan, and after the rice is done cooking, spread it out in the trays and allow the rice to cool to room temperature. It took about an hour for us. I'm not too comfortable with the rice cooling uncovered, so next time I'll sanitise some foil and cover them up. Alternatively, you might want to try leaving it in the rice cooker overnight to let it cool down.

Crush up the rice wine yeast to a fine powder in a mortar. Again, the ratio is 1 "wine cake" to 500g uncooked rice, so we used 3 of them for this batch. Ladle some rice into the carboy so that it forms a layer of rice at the bottom, then sprinkle some of the yeast on top if it. Follow this up by another layer of rice, then another layer of yeast and so on. Finally, top it off with a layer of yeast. When you're done, use the sanitised ladle to press the entire mixture down. Add 250mls of boiled, cooled water evenly into the carboy.

We are lucky to have our handy fermentation fridge which (currently) keeps the temps at 17C. We placed the carboy into the fridge, and now all we do is wait!