Making Traditional rice Wine. Cheap, Fun, and Different

saramc said:

Good to know. No pic needed. In my head I am imagining a snack cake being pitched!!

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Thanks Sara, you helped inspire me to try this, thanks.

They are little white, chalky, balls, about 5/8 inch in diameter. I don't think this process is very picky, just throw some rice and some yeast in there.

I see the rice is floating, and dropping "digested" bits. Probably once all the rice is "digested", it will all be on the bottom, and that will be the best time to take the liquid. Gonna be hard to wait that long, it smells great.

billpaustin said:

Gonna be hard to wait that long, it smells great.

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Bill...eat some of the rice around Day 3-7, delicious sweet treat. I know I have made 20+ batches & I now add extra rice so I can eat some. Oh the joy.

Don't know if anything similar has been posted before or not but anyways...
I have my first batch a few days in, and because of the simplicity of preparation, decided to pitch another. Usually I am a cider brewer so this time I cooked the rice in apple juice... Now the waiting game...
Predictions?

Fossey said:

Don't know if anything similar has been posted before or not but anyways...
I have my first batch a few days in, and because of the simplicity of preparation, decided to pitch another. Usually I am a cider brewer so this time I cooked the rice in apple juice... Now the waiting game...
Predictions?

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Sounds good, my next batch Im going to cook in a tea. Let us know how your works out.

Fossey said:

Don't know if anything similar has been posted before or not but anyways...
I have my first batch a few days in, and because of the simplicity of preparation, decided to pitch another. Usually I am a cider brewer so this time I cooked the rice in apple juice... Now the waiting game...
Predictions?

Click to expand...

Dunno about predictions but glad more ppl in this thread are experimenting and sharing, it can only lead to better rice wine for everyone! Speaking of which I tasted the rice from the half black batch and it was sweet and appley, the wine itself is coming along well almost 2 weeks in and smooth and seems to not have that tang in the regular jasmine.

I think I let my first two batches go too long. They sat for 5 and 6 weeks, and are both very acidic, and slightly vinegary. They have an intensely fruity aroma. I used the Vietnamese yeast balls with garlic, ginger, and licorice in them. I think I'll try side by side with that same yeast and some of the Chinese, and try to get them bottled sooner. My rice cooker crapped out on me, so I'm looking for another one before starting these next batches.

Fossey said:

Don't know if anything similar has been posted before or not but anyways...
I have my first batch a few days in, and because of the simplicity of preparation, decided to pitch another. Usually I am a cider brewer so this time I cooked the rice in apple juice... Now the waiting game...
Predictions?

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Awesomeness. The extra sugar will probably cause the yeast to stall out a little sooner, resulting in a sweeter batch. Though the actual amount of liquid will also make a big difference.

I'll have to try mixing some cider and rice wine. That sounds fantastic. Plus it's Saturday night and I'm stone cold sober. Have to do something about that...

LabRatBrewer said:

Sounds good, my next batch Im going to cook in a tea. Let us know how your works out.

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The batch I made with oolong tea in the rice cooker did not ferment well. It failed to saccharify enough of the rice to yield any useful amount of liquid. Though I am not sure if that was due to something in the tea, or if I pitched the yeast balls when the rice was to hot.

Leadgolem said:

The batch I made with oolong tea in the rice cooker did not ferment well. It failed to saccharify enough of the rice to yield any useful amount of liquid. Though I am not sure if that was due to something in the tea, or if I pitched the yeast balls when the rice was to hot.

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I'm pretty sure oolong and a lot of other teas have strong antimicrobial properties. You may try infusing the finished tea with oolong if you gave it a second shot.

bottlebomber said:

I'm pretty sure oolong and a lot of other teas have strong antimicrobial properties. You may try infusing the finished tea with oolong if you gave it a second shot.

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Yeah. Ferment first, then flavor. It's on the list of 45,626 things to try brewing.

Oh, rice wine and hard apple cider mix well. Not fantastic, but nicely.

bottlebomber said:

I'm pretty sure oolong and a lot of other teas have strong antimicrobial properties. You may try infusing the finished tea with oolong if you gave it a second shot.

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I did the cooked rice in green jasmine tea, was awesome. I also bottled some jasmine rice wine with 25% oolong tea--amazing. Some of the tea was lightly sweetened, some was not. Liked both actually. I think someone needs to keg some rice wine!!

As for mixes, the cider does sound good. I'm going to try that for sure.

I've posted in the past that I had an earlier batch that was very tart and had no sweetness at all. Made the rice with a large amount of water. It wasn't a pleasant drink by itself so, rather than dumping it, I mixed it 50/50 with plumb wine.

The result was something that looked, smelled and tasted like grapefruit juice. It went from lingering around because I didn't want to drink it, to gone in a flash.

I've got more plumb wine sitting in the cabinet, I'll mix up a glass later today and post a pic.

So I took the rice wine to the local homebrew store in Tampa yesterday to get some feedback. It was received pretty well. The one question I got from the brewer that I thought I would share was he wondered if you fermented it at a slightly lower temperature than room, would it result in less higher fusel/higher alcohols? I also thought about in an attempt to reduce these higher alcohols, has anybody tried adding yeast nutrient to see if it has any effect on the final product? If not, I am all for experimenting. I just don't remember all that was attempted and discussed in the previous 200 pages.

Also, has anybody fermented it with the fruit mixed in before fermentation starts?

TBBrewer said:

So I took the rice wine to the local homebrew store in Tampa yesterday to get some feedback. It was received pretty well. The one question I got from the brewer that I thought I would share was he wondered if you fermented it at a slightly lower temperature than room, would it result in less higher fusel/higher alcohols? I also thought about in an attempt to reduce these higher alcohols, has anybody tried adding yeast nutrient to see if it has any effect on the final product? If not, I am all for experimenting. I just don't remember all that was attempted and discussed in the previous 200 pages.

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I've heard of that being done with sake, but I don't believe anyone has posted anything about doing so for this rice wine.

It's on the list of things to try for me. I had planned to add some to the water the rice was cooked in.

Leadgolem said:

I've heard of that being done with sake, but I don't believe anyone has posted anything about doing so for this rice wine.

It's on the list of things to try for me. I had planned to add some to the water the rice was cooked in.

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I will do a small batch in the near future and temp control it at 70 and see what happens with one that stays at 75. Wonder if the small change will make a difference similar to brewing?

I thought everybody might be interested in a closeup of a few different rice grains. Here they, from left to right;

Apple - Fancy sweet rice
Japanese Sweet rice
Nishiki - Medium Grain rice
Royal - Basmati Rice
Golden Star - Jasmine rice

Very cool! Fancy sweet rice reminds me of this -

[ame]http://youtu.be/5xi4O1yi6b0[/ame]

Leadgolem said:

I thought everybody might be interested in a closeup of a few different rice grains. Here they, from left to right;

Apple - Fancy sweet rice
Japanese Sweet rice
Nishiki - Medium Grain rice
Royal - Basmati Rice
Golden Star - Jasmine rice

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A serial killer's TrophyTooth Collection?!!!

This is my latest creation. One bottle is blueberry RYR rice wine and the other is pineapple/peach rice wine. Cheers!

TBBrewer said:

This is my latest creation. One bottle is blueberry RYR rice wine and the other is pineapple/peach rice wine. Cheers!

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Uh-oh, this stuff could be dangerous!!!

Using only about 1.5 cups of rice, it made a 15 oz Grolsch bottle full, and a small coffee cup full, of delicious and very alcoholic brew. I just topped off the coffee cup with some fizzy Pomegranate juice, and you can't even taste the alcohol.

Dangerous. In a good way

edit: just ordered 25 lbs more of the rice, life is good!
edit2: I used 6 1/2 gallon jars, and 5 lbs of glutinous rice would fill that. My first jar, was just 1.? cups, and this is the one I've "harvested"

So it would be about 4 cups of rice for every gallon of jar space.

edit3: 5 lbs of rice creates 12 cups of rice, creates 3 gal of cooked rice to ferment, creates 1 gal of wine. That is my calculation.

jak1010 said:

As for mixes, the cider does sound good. I'm going to try that for sure.

I've posted in the past that I had an earlier batch that was very tart and had no sweetness at all. Made the rice with a large amount of water. It wasn't a pleasant drink by itself so, rather than dumping it, I mixed it 50/50 with plumb wine.

The result was something that looked, smelled and tasted like grapefruit juice. It went from lingering around because I didn't want to drink it, to gone in a flash.

I've got more plumb wine sitting in the cabinet, I'll mix up a glass later today and post a pic.

Click to expand...

As promised...

Leadgolem said:

I thought everybody might be interested in a closeup of a few different rice grains. Here they, from left to right;

Apple - Fancy sweet rice
Japanese Sweet rice
Nishiki - Medium Grain rice
Royal - Basmati Rice
Golden Star - Jasmine rice

Click to expand...

Interesting, thanks for sharing. Side by side you can really see the difference.

I harvested the batch made with the reused starch mass today. The starch mass was from a RYR+rice yeast ball batch. The prior batch had 15 cups of dry rice in it. So did the new batch. The original batch yielded about 1.5 gallons of wine. The second yielded about 2 gallons of wine.

After some thought, I would put the difference down to two things. First, there was a fairly substantial amount of unconverted starch in with the leftovers. Second, I harvested the second batch in the middle of the day when I had time. The first batch was harvested at night, and I was a little rushed.

The flavor from the second batch is very much what the first one was. With the possible difference that the new batch is a little smoother then the first.

I believe that confirms that you can reuse the starch mass from one batch to run another. I have my doubts about the wisdom of that with straight rice wine, but it seems to work extremely well with red rice wine.

The next experiment I intend to run is to dry the starch mass out, and them attempt to start batches from the dried material. I am also going to put some in the fridge for a few weeks, then try and start a batch with that. It should be interesting.

Im trying really really hard to not harvest a few days early.

CreamyGoodness said:

Im trying really really hard to not harvest a few days early.

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Nothing wrong with that, but just know that if you do the starch, sugar etc will make it a little unstable as far as wanting to carbonate etc. Mine was rice champagne for a bit after harvesting.

Good to know. Im going to wait for the weekend and do it right. The more rice converted to wine the better too... I'm feeling frugal.

It doesn't seem like there are many descriptions of the harvesting on here, so... Just in case anybody is harboring some delusion that you can harvest red rice wine without making a mess, here's a picture. The mess I made harvesting this batch was significantly smaller then what I had last time I harvested a batch of this size.

I've got a colander in the red pour spout cup. The, originally clean and rinsed in hot water, tea towel in that. Then I use the ladle, you can see the handle sticking out of another white pour spout cup, to scoop rice soup into the tea towel. I then gather the tea towel up and massage the rice soup mass. This is a lot like squeezing the whey out of ricotta. While I'm doing that I twist the tea towel as the liquid drops into the pour cup below. That keeps constant pressure on the mass. You have to be a little careful not to apply to much pressure, or you can force a small piece of rice through the tea towel. Which will result in rice wine shooting out of the tea towel in that spot. When it feels like the contents of the tea towel are down to putty I twist the towel hard, including the top. The wine tends to wick into it. Then untwist the whole thing and scrape the leftover starch putty into the third pour spout cup. Then I pour the wine in the red pour spout cup into the 3 gallon glass beverage dispenser in the background.

The second picture is of the leftover starch putty set out to dry. I forgot to take a picture day of, so this is after it has been sitting overnight. I've got a fan pointed at these to help them dry out. I doubt the starch in the muffin cups will dry out enough to be stored. To much mass in one spot. The material on the baking sheet should though. I did break up the starch putty when I put it on the sheet, to help it dry out. I've also got a 1/2 full quart ziplock bag in the fridge of the same material. I had about 3/4 of a gallon, one of the pour spout cups completely full, of rice starch putty from the batch of red rice wine.

Could you put them in the oven on a very low setting to speed the drying process?

I just use a paint strainer bag and its been pretty straightforward harvesting a 2 gallon ferm bucket but looks like you may have a bigger batch

TBBrewer said:

Could you put them in the oven on a very low setting to speed the drying process?

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I could. I've also got a food dehydrator. I'm not going to use either. Considering how sensitive the process seems to be to the temperature of the rice when the batch is mixed up, I'm worried that either one would cook the fungus/yeast I'm trying to preserve.

Ostomo517 said:

I just use a paint strainer bag and its been pretty straightforward harvesting a 2 gallon ferm bucket but looks like you may have a bigger batch

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If you were to pack it in, this would have been right about 3 gallons of material. I didn't want to do that, so it ended up being more like 3.75 with the air space. When they are packed in, these larger batches tend to develop a "cap". They get bubbles of co2 stuck under partially converted rice above the level of the liquid. That mass doesn't really convert unless you punch holes in it so it sinks down into the liquid. If you leave the rice loose, the co2 can escape and you don't get a "cap". That's a lesson I learned with my last couple of batches.

Doesn't the paint strainer bag leave a lot of rice bits in the wine? I mean the holes in the mesh are rather large.

They do get through some (use bag and mesh strainer) but it gets crystal clear after a fridge cold crash that its not a huge concern. After clearing I transfer to another bottle most times.

Ostomo517 said:

They do get through some (use bag and mesh strainer) but it gets crystal clear after a fridge cold crash that its not a huge concern. After clearing I transfer to another bottle most times.

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Ok, so you're decanting off the larger solids. The tea towel won't allow them to pass through unless you are pushing on it to hard.

If I read you right, are you just retaining the cleared liquid and discarding the cloudy stuff?

Leadgolem said:

Ok, so you're decanting off the larger solids. The tea towel won't allow them to pass through unless you are pushing on it to hard.

If I read you right, are you just retaining the cleared liquid and discarding the cloudy stuff?

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Yeah usually I like the cleared better but I have been known to drink the cloudy part too

Ostomo517 said:

Yeah usually I like the cleared better but I have been known to drink the cloudy part too

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Huh, ok. I actually stir it up so the solids are suspended again before drinking, usually anyway.

I started 10 lbs dry in a 5 gall ferment bucket a couple of weeks ago. I made a manifold of sorts like a mash tun round cooler would have in hopes of making harvesting easier. I pulled a sample today and it seems to be working. Its still bubbling every few seconds so I know it's not done yet. We will see in another week or so if it performs as well as I want it to. Pic of manifold before filling with 10 lbs jasmine rice and 14 large yeast balls layered in.

Harvesting with a mesh bag and a guitar stand. Not much mess... swap out the buckets and drop the bag into the new one, scoop out the solids or just dump them into the bucket and set aside.

TBBrewer said:

This is my latest creation. One bottle is blueberry RYR rice wine and the other is pineapple/peach rice wine. Cheers!

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The pineapple peach looks amazing. When did you add the adjunct fruit? I might try to do a little something like that with one of the two batches I have going now. Add a little fruit juice to it right before pasteurizing.

OK so I just got back from the store and getting ready to pull the trigger on this. Here is what I got:



and this:



So I've read most of the thread and asked for a recap about 20 pages ago. Let me just get this straight. Soak the rice for at least an hour. Then cook the rice using a 1.25:1 ratio of water to amount of dry rice you started with? Also, I've seen very different amounts of how many crushed balls (lol) to use per amount of rice.

I'm planning on making enough rice to fill 2 or 3 of the WM one quart cookie jar things.

Also, does the rice have to be steamed? I don't have a rice cooker and I live in a condo and I really don't like having "one trick pony" appliances taking up space. I don't eat rice so don't have a need for one other than making wine.

Am I on the right track? Is there a step by step besides the general one in the OP I could use that takes into account all the good wisdom thus far in this thread? I'm looking for a "making RW for dummies" kind of thing.

Thanks

elkshadow said:

OK so I just got back from the store and getting ready to pull the trigger on this. Here is what I got:



and this:



So I've read most of the thread and asked for a recap about 20 pages ago. Let me just get this straight. Soak the rice for at least an hour. Then cook the rice using a 1.25:1 ratio of water to amount of dry rice you started with? Also, I've seen very different amounts of how many crushed balls (lol) to use per amount of rice.

I'm planning on making enough rice to fill 2 or 3 of the WM one quart cookie jar things.

Also, does the rice have to be steamed? I don't have a rice cooker and I live in a condo and I really don't like having "one trick pony" appliances taking up space. I don't eat rice so don't have a need for one other than making wine.

Am I on the right track? Is there a step by step besides the general one in the OP I could use that takes into account all the good wisdom thus far in this thread? I'm looking for a "making RW for dummies" kind of thing.

Thanks

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Looks good. I cook the rice in a pot just like I always have. I've never measured the water. I wash the rice till the water runs clean, then add water till its about 1/2 inch or so above the rice. Bring to a boil then simmer covered for 20 minutes. Others have great results with steamers, but I'm like you and don't want another appliance. I use about 1 ball per 2 cups rice. Lately, I've been playing with RYR + Yeast Balls. Because of the quick"ish" turn around, its easy to experiment. Good luck!

LabRatBrewer said:

Looks good. I cook the rice in a pot just like I always have. I've never measured the water. I wash the rice till the water runs clean, then add water till its about 1/2 inch or so above the rice. Bring to a boil then simmer covered for 20 minutes. Others have great results with steamers, but I'm like you and don't want another appliance. I use about 1 ball per 2 cups rice. Lately, I've been playing with RYR + Yeast Balls. Because of the quick"ish" turn around, its easy to experiment. Good luck!

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Cool thanks. I looked for RYR but I don't think they had it. They had 5 or 6 kinds in the cooler section that said "sweet" or "fermented" or both on them but I read earlier in the thread these weren't good to use. The place I went is huge and I have to believe they have it somewhere in there but I didn't see it. I saw dry red rice with the other rices but not RYR. The language barrier is thick at this place. I even asked for Koji and they looked at me like I was from another planet. I'm in Denver so this is by no means the only Asian megamarket. I'll keep looking.

Thanks again.