Thai style medicinal homebrew

Came home to find the wife doing something rather exciting...

She's got these 10 liter bins from the market, a bunch of exotic fruits and herbs and is doing some homebrew to make Chinese medicine tonics.



The bins have screw-on lids but are not airtight, she's left them slightly loose.
Each bin has 5 liters of water and 1 kg of brown sugar.

She washed the fruit and herbs then dumped them with bottled water and brown sugar direct in the bins - no yeast was added.

The plan is to leave them for a year then mix them together to create the elixir. She is still missing three vital ingredients.


Bin 1 is 3 kg Thai red grapes.


Bin 2 is 3 kg boraphet (Giloya)
http://healthnbeauty.myworldmysite.com/content/health-benefits-giloya


Bin 3 is 3 kg makham pom (Emblica)
http://www.siamnatural.com/makhampom.htm


Bin 4 is 3kg samor (Chebula)
http://www.ayurvista.net/herbs/?view&herb=70efdf2ec9b086079795c442636b55fb


Bin 5 is snow lotus extract (said to be from Tibet)
http://herbs-treatandtaste.blogspot.com/2011/06/snow-lotus-spectacular-snow-lotus.html

She plans to sell 700ml bottles for about 4 dollars locally. I sampled her friends medicines today, it is fairly low alcohol, very sweet, tastes a little bit like Korean traditional wines eg bokbunja. Not unpleasant but not something I would drink recreationally. One slight problem, alcohol brewing might be illegal I'm not sure. Also I have my doubts about the no yeast thing, and lack of airlock - which is why I'm posting in this subforum.

Very Interesting...


Sometime, I am going to look at adding tinctures or extracts of herbs to some of my brews.

I assume with sugar it is going to ferment and there will be some alcohol. Not really sure what she is making there. Is it supposed to be medicine for something particular?

I can tell you thst it is indeed illegal mate, but the maximum fine is a few thousand baht, not enough to scare any of the homebrewthailand forum members off brewing.

homebrewthailand that's just what I'm looking for!

The finished product is called nam mak and is a general heath tonic popular with ladies and the elderly (who cannot afford western pharmaceuticals). Each ingredient has a long list of claimed health benefits so when you put them all together it's a bit of a cure-all.

I'm still worried about the lack of airlock and yeast - the one time I didn't fix the lid properly on my fermenter I got fruit flies.

Bin 6 is 3kg luk yaw (Thai Noni, Morinda citrifolia)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morinda_citrifolia

People fermented for thousands of years without airlocks. Once you have initial fermentation you can probably seal the lid and just vent once a week for a few weeks, unless the goal is to make more of a vinegary beverage. In that case, you need that oxygen exposure.

Although the selling of this in America as "Alcohol" is probably illegal, and the AMA may have issues with folk medicine, especially for sale, this is fascinating to me. I've read about a lot of traditional healing rememdies and such in my life, but never heard about fermented ones. Do you have more information on these things? I'm fascinated.....

A lot of stuff used in healing, can actually be pleasant to imbibe in as well....So I'd love to know more about this stuff.....even just as a cook and a brewer to know about the flavors of these things.

ReverseApacheMaster said:

People fermented for thousands of years without airlocks. Once you have initial fermentation you can probably seal the lid and just vent once a week for a few weeks, unless the goal is to make more of a vinegary beverage. In that case, you need that oxygen exposure.

Click to expand...

Seal and vent is exactly the method she intends to use.
It's a bit different from my bacteria-phobic fermenting style.

You may want to get the jars stood in water to build a "moat" against food searching ants and so on. My wife's olds do that when they make the saa-toh for drinking at thai new year

How is their sato? Haven't decided what I'm going to brew yet. I'd like to make stuff using local ingredients, if it can produce something enjoyable.

Interesting - my wife is from Thailand so I'll have to see if she is familiar with this. Her family lives in the Isan area (NE Thailand) and the folks in the rural villages have all kinds of concoctions they pass off for medicine (I'm sure some have legitimate uses but it's hard to tell the good from the bad). I lived there for a year, but never came across these brews.

Its great. Some times they add wild honey, bananas are a favourite and even things like lamyai work wery well.

I showed my wife the pictures last night, and her parents brew up the same tonics as you guys are making. They make bigger batches, since apparently my father in law drinks the stuff every day (that along with the Lao Khao and Red Bull drinks that he has with his friends. They would make Lao Khao drinks for me just to watch me cringe when drinking it... terrible stuff. Any health benefits they get from the tonics were likely destroyed immediately by drinking Lao Khao).
They would age out the tonics for 6 months and drink it while it's still kind of sweet. My wife liked to drink some of the tonics, but said a couple of them are pretty bad/bitter tasting.
Thanks for sharing the pics.