Recent content by brooklynkayak

"or bottle at 4 weeks no matter what" Some of us add more water and wait longer than the traditional method. This produces a drier rice wine.

"Never had any luck using the lees, not worth it in my opinion." Yes, reusing lees does provide yeast, but doesn't provide much of the other required ingredients. The starch may not have fully converted to sugar for the yeast to act on.

Yes, I personally prefer the taste of rice wine over rice wine vinegar. I also don't miss cleaning up the mess from exploding bottles. Your are also less prone to foul taste from other organisms growing in your bottles. Salmonella and other nasties can be an issue after long term storage...

I have seen other variations of these lemonades in 750ml (Grolch style bottles) here and there. They seem to be sold by many supermarket chains under different brand names, I picked up some from Sprouts, a supermarket chain here in Tucson AZ US, $2.50 US a bottle, including the lemonade...

Sounds like the typically strange experience I have when ever I go looking for them. I guess you should know how to read Chinese before you make rice wine:) One woman at an Asian market was concerned that I I was buying the wrong kind of rice. She said concerned "that rice is glutinous...

...and makes a lot of rice wine:)

Did you ask people who were somewhat fluent in English? I have found it in the smallest of Asian stores, but had to twist arms to find out where it was. I have seen it hidden in the candy section, behind the counter where they keep the expensive herbs, in the housewares section next to...

I have talked to a few Chinese and one Korean who made rice wine the way they traditionally made rice wine in their family and they never stirred theirs. Most don't know why, it's just the way it has always been done in their families. One person felt that the crust at the top contained...

Re: "This allows oxygen to get into the rice/yeast/water". As a general rule, encouraging oxygen to mix into the mash is a good way to make rice wine vinegar, but not rice wine. In most cases this shouldn't be a problem for the short term fermentation as in your instructions, but why try to...

How did you know it was bad mold? I would think if it was bad you would have been able to smell something wrong.

I recently moved to a house that has a closet that I can dedicate to fermenting rice wine. So I moved up to larger scale production. No more cookie jar quantities for me:-) I now have a real 20 liter fermenter and Grolsch cap style wine bottles to store the finished product. This allows for...

Re: "How typical is this?" This is somewhat typical. But be aware that at this point it will have a very low alcohol content and will be very sweet. It is common in China to harvest only after two 2 to 5 days and consume as a low alcohol food. It generally takes over 3 weeks to reach a higher...

All I know is that if I drink a lot of rice wine, I will end up with the same next day symptoms that I get from overindulgence in grape wine or beer. I do not get the same hangover with distilled spirits after overindulgence. That's not going t stop me from drinking any kind of wine or...

The one disadvantage that freeze concentration has over evaporative distillation is that you are also concentrating the toxic by-products of the fermentation. Most of the toxic chemicals can be removed in the evaporative distillation process when done properly.

Not the same thing at all. Don't even consider cargo rice for making rice wine.