The Making of Rice Wine

Dalat, December 29th 2010

Vietnamese rice wine still reminds me of the rice wine I drank while I was in Sapa. First, sorry to say, just like the Japanese sake, Vietnamese rice wine also smells awful to me. In Sapa I was made to drink 2 small cups of rice wine. The results on my stomach lasted until a week after I returned home.

Therefore, lacking interest in the subject, I lacked some information on the making of rice wine.

It was a home industry. The rice was kept a big pail like this for fermentation. As far as I remember, Tin said that they usually use the low-quality rice or broken rice.

Under the lid of the pail is like this.The rice is kept for fermentation about 5-8 days. This
depends on the weather outside. If it's hot, the time is shorter. Otherwise, it'll take longer.

And then, the fermented rice is boiled on a big stove like this.

Coffee peel is used to fuel the stove. In the first picture here you can see coffee beans being dried.

And then in the second picture you see the coffee peels kept in sacks.

I guess, since the stove has to be kept on around the clock, they need a great stock amount of coffee peels. At the entrance door I saw a huge stack of sacks containing coffee peels.

The vapor of the fermented rice goes up into the pipe and through the wall.

The pipe led back into the house through a wall like this and the rice wine flew down ready to be bottled and consumed. On the sight of this, my interest on rice wine dropped to minus. Yaks.