Make BAIJIU with MOLDY RICE! Chinese White Whiskey😉

before you buy it you have to smack the rice why do you slap the rice it feels good it feels good okay kids today we're gonna make baiju if you don't know what it is it's a clear all-grain spirit from china that's made in a single pot still run and currently it is the most widely consumed spirit on the planet you might be wondering why you haven't heard of this stuff before and honestly it's probably because of the taste but we're going to get into that in a second just a quick note here this is going to be a pretty long video i think so if you want to skip to this time code that's where the recipe starts everything in the middle is important information but i know you guys love to skip half of my videos so go ahead since it's an all grain spirit technically i guess it fits more in the whiskey category than anywhere else it's most commonly made from sorghum and millet but in southeastern china it's very often made from short grain rice just like sake we're gonna make the rice version today but eventually i'm gonna make a version with sorghum just to see what the differences are so what does baiju actually taste like well it could be pretty harsh and have some unique flavors that westerners don't really like it's not what you'd call an approachable spirit it's generally served between 50 and 65 abv so right out of the bottle it's trying to pick a fight also the desirable flavors in baiju come from a heavy reliance on the heads and the tails flavors like potpourri rotten fruit soy sauce and sometimes nail polish remover but there's also a rice scented or rice essence baiju and that's what we're going to go for today my goal here is to use baiju brewing and distilling techniques to end up making a finished product that is more suited to the western palette specifically my pound now don't get me wrong i'm not trying to crap on baiju there's like a billion people that drink it and there are distilleries in china that are like 500 years old that have been making it using traditional techniques combined with like hard science like nerds and lab coats to specifically get those harsher flavors in their finished product on purpose this is what they want i know that my american tongue prefers sweet flavors fruity flavors grainy flavors stuff like that so that's what we're aiming for today if you want to see the video that inspired me to make baiju in the first place check out this link right up here it's to a youtube channel called drunkardly now granted all of it's in chinese and only some of the videos have subtitles but you can kind of figure out what's going on just by watching that's the cool thing about having a physical practical hobby is if you watch someone else's video in another language you pretty much figure out what they're doing so i've been wanting to do this project since i saw that first video before the pandemic and i've been working on this for almost two years because i dug myself into such a deep research hole now that i've dug myself out of that nerd pit i'm finally ready to share this project with you guys so let's cover the basics how is baiju even made it's pretty simple you start off by washing your grain and then steaming it like i said a lot of baiju is made with sorghum or millet but today we're going to use short grain rice short grain rice has a lot more starch in it than medium or long grain rice so that's what we're going to be using because more starch means more potential sugar to ferment into alcohol so after it's cooked the grain is then cooled off and mixed with some yeast and a special mold that converts the starches into sugars so that it can then be fermented if you're familiar with sake brewing then you know where this is going so there is no grain mashing process where you steep the grain at 145 to activate your amylase enzymes because there's no malt in the process at all the mold does everything for you it produces those enzymes and it breaks down the starches into sugars at room temperature so once you have everything mixed together you let the mold convert the starches into sugars and then the yeast takes the sugars and converts those into alcohol all at the same time crazy right and since those two processes are happening concurrently it takes a lot longer to ferment a normal whiskey mash can be done in three to seven days but a mold mold-based fermentation can take a month or more recently jesse did a video on the stillett channel where he used kind of a turbocharged version of this process with a product called angel yellow label yeast for some reason through some sort of science theirs works really really fast and you can check his video out right up here so the other drawback for using mold is that you can't tell what your starting gravity is because there is no sugar in the beginning of the fermentation it's all starch the sugar all gets converted from the starch little by little during the entire fermentation process so what you do is you figure out the probable starting gravity based on the ratio of the weight of the grain and the volume of the water five pounds of rice in one gallon of water will give you about a 20 percent abv 19 to 20 percent assuming everything goes right i'm recommending at least three and a half to four pounds per gallon of water because you want this thing to get up above 10 abv just to fight off any sort of bacterial infections that can happen and i'll get into that in a minute so in sake brewing they use a mold called aspergillus orize also known as koji in japan and koji is one of those molds that's specially evolved to produce those amylase enzymes to convert your starches into sugars aspergillus or is used throughout asia for alcohol production but also to make soy sauce by fermenting soybeans but today we're not going to use koji we're going to use another mold that does the same thing called monascus purpureus it's also known as red yeast rice but the word yeast is a misnomer in there because it's not a yeast it's a mold let's see if we can focus in on this red yeast rice is basically just grains of rice with this monascus properties that's been propagated to to grow on the rice and then they dry it out so it stops growing and you may have heard of red yeast rice before because very often it's a dietary supplement to help treat high cholesterol don't bother running to the health food store and picking up a bottle of red yeast rice capsules because that won't work i tried it already i'm pretty sure they sterilize it before they turn it into a supplement you need to get this stuff online or if you're lucky enough to have an asian market somewhere near you then uh just go and look for this stuff it's in a ton of different uh chinese and korean dishes so it's gonna be probably with the spices maybe also with the rice but if you're like me and you don't have easy access to an asian grocery store nearby then i put an amazon link for this stuff down in the video description so uh the only problem with this stuff is that occasionally it will have um some bacteria mixed in there it's not a scientifically isolated culture to make this stuff because ultimately it's a food product it's an immediate use thing that you really you don't usually have to worry about that stuff on one of my previous batches i got an acetobacter infection in my brew and i ended up making 15 gallons of vinegar rice mush and that was really disappointing i almost cried so you can try to freeze this stuff at like dry ice temperatures to kill any potential bacteria but it's probably going to take you several days to do that and it's it's a little bit um process prohibitive but the other thing you can do is like i said just make sure that your brew is gonna hit over ten percent abv by making sure that you're at three and a half to four pounds of rice per gallon of water so that you hit that abv and that'll pretty much eliminate any chance of a bacterial infection the reason why i'm choosing this stuff rather than the koji is because i want to go with as much authenticity and and adhering to the traditional recipes i can for the regional baiju that i'm trying to make which is pretty much what xiaoli made in her videos on her drunkardly channel the other reason is the flavor this stuff gives you some really fantastic flavors i did a little baby test of it with some rice and i let it propagate for a little while and it ended up tasting like starburst candy so the flavors you get from this stuff are are worth the effort in my opinion okay that's enough about the mold for the most part in china baijiu brewing is done in something called solid state fermentation meaning they cook the grain with steam but they don't make a wash there's no slurry of grain and and liquid there's no strained liquid to then ferment it's just this kind of damp grain bed with the yeast and the mold mixed into it and then they throw it in earthen pits and they let it ferment for like three months and leave it alone we're not doing that today because that is that's something i am not prepared to test yet so today we're actually just gonna make a wine we're just gonna make a big-ass tub of rice wine as far as how they distill baiju it's a really interesting system so you don't have a wash to pour into a boiler and then run through a still like 99 of every other spirit produced on this planet you just have this kind of mushy grain bed so what do you do with it well they have these really cool stills called heavenly pots or sky pots the boiler has water in it and the column is almost the same size as the mouth of the boiler it's the it's a big bamboo thing they fill it full of grain and then they they put the still head on top and the still head just collects the steam and it rains down the edges and then out the pipe it's a really fascinating system but what i've noticed about how they distill is they just run it i mean it is running hot and fast from all the videos that i've seen it's just blowing and it doesn't matter if it's at the industrial scale where they're cooking a few tons of the grain or at like the home scale where they're doing like 50 to 100 pounds and i would love to test one of those out i can't find any on like ally express if there are any heavenly pot still manufacturers out there that would like for me to test one out on my channel send me an email so i don't have a heavenly pot but i do have a thumper and with my thumper i can hypothetically pack in some of my grain mush and run the vapor through that to approximate the process so that in a very large nutshell is how they make budging the reason why i gave you a deep dive into the entire process and some of the cultural aspects is because there's actually some really valuable techniques in there that i think we need to explore going forward i want to look at solid state fermentation i want to do some more experiments with the mold you know i figured the best way to do that is to to dive right in and try to make this stuff as authentically as i can so that going forward i i have a base to work from you know it's not all just you know theoretical knowledge okay so on to the recipe that we're using today for this project i'm doing 25 pounds of rice and seven gallons of water and in my batch i only did one pound of the red yeast rice but i'm recommending that you guys do one pound for every five pounds of rice not one pound for 25 pounds of rice you're also going to need some yeast nutrient and i'll put a link for this down in the video description and some ec1118 i'm recommending this champagne yeast because it ferments very cleanly and it's got a super high alcohol tolerance at 20 20 to 21 stupid bifocals yeah i gotta wear bifocals now damn damn so about seven tablespoons of this for your big fat 25 pounds of rice and uh two packets two packets of these and how much of this one pound or one package they're 14 ounce packages so one of these packages roughly a pound for every five pounds of grain the reason why i'm recommending you go that high is because one pound for every 25 pounds of rice it just converted too slowly there wasn't enough mold in there to make it go at a normal rate and usually this stuff should get done in about a month mine took three ish and so my wife wasn't really happy with having a giant tub of slowly dissolving red rice mush in the bathtub in our guest bathroom so sorry honey okay so first things first dump all the rice into a big-ass tub and wash it several times fill the tub with water rinse it out and do that two or three times until the water comes out clear and then refill the tub and let it sit overnight the next day you're gonna drain off the water and then steam the rice for about an hour or more i recommend doing five pound batches at a time no more i know that sounds like a pain in the butt but you'll get a much more thorough cooking on the rice so it's up to you and you want the rice to be fully cooked so that the mold can actually penetrate all the way through each of the grains and chew them up and turn them into sugars for you after it's cooked dump your rice into your fermenter and let it cool to about room temperature and then dump in your red yeast rice your yeast and your yeast nutrient stir it up really well and then top it up with water or put the water in first it doesn't matter if you want to help this stuff along you can skip the water for a day or two and let the mold sort of start propagating on the rice that it's touching without the water in there and that'll help it to grow a little bit faster so that uh maybe it'll speed up your conversion i don't know i haven't tested that but i've seen that a few times so it's up to you so as it ferments you want to come by and stir it with a sanitized spoon at least every two or three days and just kind of keep an eye on it and eventually everything's gonna slump down to the bottom and turn into sludge when you go in to stir it if you don't get any more co2 bubbles being released then it's done and you can give it another week to sit there and and you know see if it's going to do anymore but once it stops releasing co2 you're most likely done and that can take anywhere from 30 days to 90 days depending on how much of this stuff you actually put in with your rice so mine's done let's uh let's go have a taste and get it siphoned into buckets this is my bathroom this is what the wine looks like after it's fermented no i'm not dissolving a body in my bathroom this time this doesn't smell like rice at all it smells like fruit wine it smells like i got strawberries and grape and kiwi and really bright fruit flavors very alcoholic but very very nice fruit flavors let's have a little taste yeah really really nice bright crisp flavors it kind of reminds me of like a like a pinot grigio or something that's good it's definitely got some tartness to it though which is interesting but uh you know not like vinegar or anything i know what that tastes like since the wine tastes so good you can just bottle it up or you can siphon it into your boiler and do something else with it hypothetically to get the last drags out of your stuff here you can take a colander like i did and press that down in there as deep as you can and then lower your wand down in there and restart the siphon because it's going to pull everything from all the way around at a much lower level now mostly we have the mush and if you want you can strain the mush and then let that settle over time especially if you cold crash it maybe add some gelatin to it it'll definitely settle out so that you have more clear wine but i recommend if you have a thumper try something a little different you can just put some of the rice sludge down into the thumper and run your product through that to pull more flavor and to extract any residual alcohol in there now as far as actually how you might distill this as a hobbyist you could do a stripping run and then a spirit run if you want to but when they're making this stuff they just do a single run and if you're running through a thumper then i would say you probably don't need to do a stripping run but you know of course make that assessment after you've done your first run even if you want to do a stripping run maybe run normal instead of super hot just so you can figure out what flavors you get in case it's good the way it is i don't know but i always recommend collecting in 200 milliliter increments in your jars and then cover them with paper towels or coffee filters or something and let them air out overnight so that you can figure out where those funky flavors are and where the good stuff is and where the other funky stuff is and make your cuts really easily the next day before we move on to the assessment and the blending i want to take a second to thank each and every one of my patreon members for supporting my channel i really love having other nerds to talk to about this stuff and bounce ideas off of i could not do this without your help so thank you very much if you want to consider supporting me on patreon to get early access and input on what i do around here check out the link to my patreon page down in the video description if you distill this you're going to have an interesting experience the wine is very fruity as the wine is heating up it's incredibly fruity like cherries and you know all kinds of just boom fruit all over the place but when you actually get the distillate it's really not not very fruity at all which was rather surprising to me i will say that there there was a lot less heads than i expected but the the the fruity character the really potent uh fruity essences that i was smelling they're they're really not it's not in here that much there's a tiny bit of like cherry and apple but not a whole lot i mean way less than i expected especially if you're going to use the thumper because you're reinfusing that flavor through the entire run there's a little bit of a kind of a fake sweetness there's a little bit of ricey character to it but not much it's really subtle it smells like a nice spirit i tasted some a few days ago and it was nice but it was kind of indistinct there was some licoricey notes not a whole lot on the aroma side but just a little faint licoricey note in there so this has been sitting for two days it's um 56 i'm not going to proof it down because you know it's by jew so give it a taste yeah there's some black licorice in there so uh black licorice and a fruity character that is kind of nondescript it's almost like a little bit of red licorice i'm kind of getting that kind of weird nondescript fruit flavor with some with some rice cooked rice and licorice it's earthy it's rich it's got some astringency on the back of the tongue not a lot though i like this so generally baiju is not aged on wood it's aged in big clay vessels big clay jars or you know stainless steel vats if they're doing it at the industrial scale so it's not aged on wood but there is some esterification some changes in the flavor just through natural chemistry that's going to happen in those jars i'm interested to see what this is going to taste like in about a year i think the next time i do a baiju experiment i'm gonna do the solid state fermentation with some sorghum and some millet but when we complete that project and i post that video we'll go ahead and do a follow-up tasting of this for right now i'm actually really happy with this i think this stuff would make a really good base for absinthe you know so like distilled to a higher proof than 56 maybe you know 80 or 90 and then macerate all your herbs in it and so you're already gonna have that complex flavor not just a neutral and i think that might be really good yeah this is really tasty it's got a little bit of sweet aroma to it and a sweet flavor it's a tiny bit hot but it's not like razor blades like some people have described it's it's really very delicious the one baiju i had had a really strong rotten pineapple flavor to it it was it was definitely hotter than this i think that's just a heavier reliance on the heads content for those flavor compounds because this is definitely more subtle but it's really good yeah this was a success i dig this so yeah it can take you a month to do it and you have to you have to baby it as far as you know stirring it every couple of days but you know this is a hobby we're we're doing this because it's it's fun to fiddle around with stuff i think i'm going to go ahead and age some because the the licorice in here and uh the sweetness i think would do really well with some with some wood patrons if you're watching i'm gonna put a uh a vote over on the patreon site so you can vote on some wood types because i need your input on this i'll put all my tasting notes in and then we can talk about it over there on the patreon site all right that's the tasting done now i have to go edit this video i'm so glad i did this the culmination of two years of research and around i'm just glad that it worked out so that i could finally share it with you guys i've been sitting on this one forever all right well if you like this video do me a favor and hit the like button it really helps out the channel and it lets youtube know that this is content that they should keep promoting to other viewers if you have any questions or comments feel free to put them down in the comments section down below if you're not subscribed to my channel you probably should so that you get notified when i post new content otherwise you're just missing out so hit the subscribe button and the little bell icon right next to it and that will set your notifications alright thanks for watching talk at you later you

Channel: Bearded & Bored

Views: 35,981

Keywords: Bearded and Bored, How to Make Rice BAIJIU. Chinese White Whiskey from Rice Wine, Baijiu, how to make baijiu, how to make rice wine, red yeast rice, how to make shaojiu, shaojiu, how to distill rice wine, how to distill baijiu, 红曲米, 白酒, 烧酒, 米香, 如何制作白酒, 怎么做烧酒, koji, how to brew rice wine, how to brew with koji, sake brewing, how to make sake, how to make Chinese rice wine, 米酒, 如何酿造米酒, rice liquor, rice wine, chinese baijiu, rice vodka, soju, shoju, shochu

Id: X2kutEd7q1E

Length: 24min 51sec (1491 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 26 2021