Naturally, Nepal and Tibet have become a second home (quite literally) to me as a mountaineer, so spending a lot of time with these people means spending a lot of time brewing and drinking with these people. In the remote Himalayas, aside from places like Everest and Annapurna Base camps, you'd be hard pressed to find any beer - and even harder to find varieties apart from San Miguel, Lowenbrau, and maybe a few others. Thus, I present to you Nepalese and Tibetan beer made from rice.
The taste of Chaang (ཆང་) is like that of ale, but a little different. The alcohol content is quite low, it produces heat in the body and has a bite to it. Chaang is widely consumed by the hill people (sherpas, tamangs, tibetians, etc.) of the Himalayas for enduring the cold temperatures which go below freezing point during the winters. The local people believe it can cure common cold, fever and allergies. It is linked to the myth of the abominable snowman, too. Everyone in Nepal and Tibet believes that the snowman creature likes to drink Chaang, which is why they take their clothes off to brew it. I don't know why, but it's just the custom. I just go with it.
Here is a wiki article, too:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chhaang
Ingredients
1. 11lbs of cooked Basmati rice
2. Tibbo Yeast (Tibetan yeast - you can get some from me if you PM me or you can use other yeast, sake yeast) This is available at Chinese, Vietnamese, and Malaysian markets as yeast balls. I'm sure some Indian markets may carry it, too.
3. Laughter
4. Other common stuff
1. Cook the Rice and spread it on a large mat (think of like a suntanning mat)
2. Let the rice cool and take three pieces of yeast (Tibbo yeast), and spread it on all the rice.
3. Take off clothing out of respect and roll around on the rice, smooshing it.
4. Take 3 pieces of tibbo yeast and crush
7. Put the rice into the clothes, or a cloth (if you didn't take off you're clothes)
8. Hang the cloth with the rice in it up and in 24 hours check the rice.
9. Put fermenting rice into clay pottery bucket by hand from the cloth. This is tricky because the pottery needs holes to drain into another pot which will be sealed and not have holes in it.
10. Seal and leave if possible for one month
11. Open lid of tightly sealed bucket in one month.
12. Take out as much mix as required
13. Mix with cold water
14. Strain
15. Drink. The longer you ferment, the better your Chaang will be. The better your chaang is, the clearer it will be. This is, according to legend, because of the purity of one's soul.
Tibetian Chaang Recipe from the Himalayas
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