Hello, I too made rice wine about 1.5 years back and posted my results here. I made with ARL and bakers yeast I believe, or ginger. The wine was sour and somewhat dry.
If you have read the whole thread, can you help me understand few things.
What would be the recipie of a rice wine which is clear, sweet and light on palate? The kind you would drink in small sips along with savoury food or just on its own.
I am always intrigued by the wine in Jackie Chan's movie drunken master. He always gulps it down with food and the wine seems clear and of a bit water consistency, even would be made with rice. Now of course it's a movie but the wine is appealing nonetheless.
The thread has SO many recipies and
experiments that a person can be lost in this thread. I said this before and will say it again: there is a need to catalogue working recipies from this thread along with photos(where provided) and post it on the front page. Would be amazing.
I personally have ARL available not the yeast balls even on eBay. I am from India, so the Thai sweet rice is not easily available by the name. What should be the rice be like? I am saying in terms of size of grain, thickness and other characterstics? How should it be cooked? Should it be sticky or cooked with grains separated.
The yeast is available here, on eBay, from brand like Red star and Lalvin; most common types like Montrachet and EC1118.
Can a rice wine made at home be clear, like say sake? I would love to have a recipie which can be replicated again and again and produce same result each time.
Hope you tag other people, friends of yours to this post and let them share their recipies here.
Thanks!
Quite a bit to respond to here.
As I said, I read through the entirety of the thread as it existed about 3 years ago, and I think I've kept up with most of it, though very sporadically, since then. What that all amounts to is that I have a bunch of impressions on the making of rice wine but not much practical knowledge that I recall other than that which comes anecdotally from my own experience.
I believe some people have said that ARL tends to produce a drier wine while yeast balls often make a fuller wine. My own experience was that yeast balls infected more batches than not, but I was using traditionally-produced yeast balls and not the professional ones sold overseas that are probably made in a much cleaner environment and less prone to carrying unwanted microorganisms. My best rice wine has always been made with ARL. I have not used, nor do I see any reason to add any other yeast, as ARL and yeast balls both contain all of the fungus and yeast necessary to make rice into wine.
I have definitely drunk rice wines like you describe - light (around 5% ABV), clear, sweet - but only commercial examples. I don't know how they're made. My guess would be that they ferment the rice wine for a shorter time and then pasteurize it to stop any further fermentation, then fine and/or cold crash for clarity and leave the lees behind. However, I feel like it might not be that simple: stopping a rice wine ferment at 5% would likely mean getting far less liquid out of the same batch size as there isn't enough time for complete liquifaction, and adding water would mean you'd probably end up with something either weaker or less sweet. It's probably a matter of adding the right amount of water that a 5% fermentation still has plenty of sugars left in it. I would also probably use glutinous rice, as I think it would make for a sweeter final product which you seem to be aiming for.
On the other hand, the wine he's supposed to be drinking in Drunken Master is probably just straight rice wine, fully fermented and decanted off the lees when they settled out, or possibly made with some other kind of grain entirely - Chinese booze has a wide and varied history and much of it is quite unpleasant to drink to the untrained palate (if the palate can be trained to it at all, which I somewhat doubt about some varieties I've had, including most of the distilled stuff called baijiu, which is rarely made with rice).
As for rice, I'm not one of those who has experimented with varieties. I have always just used whatever domestic Chinese rice I had on hand for regular cooking, and I haven't noticed significant differences in taste or yield with any of them. Glutinous rice is the standard for brewing rice wine as far as I understand, but it's more expensive than regular eating rice so I've never bothered with it. As for consistency, I just try to get the rice as wet as possible to increase the yield and aid in liquefaction, but it's good to have some airspace between some of the rice, hence the advice I've seen somewhere that you roll up balls of rice mixed with your fermenting culture and put them in your fermenter rather than mashing all the rice down in one big mass.
Finally, as I've alluded to a few times recently, your best bet for clarity is to cold crash your harvested wine in a refrigerator for anywhere from a few days to a few weeks, then decant the clear wine off of the lees and toss the lees in a smoothie, a curry, a soup, the garden, the trash, or wherever else you please. I've had a batch or two that tasted best shaken up with the lees and drunk cloudy, but most of the time I find the clear stuff is better.
