top-fermented ale and flavored with sugar and coriander to make faro; or re-fermented in the barrel for four to six months with fresh whole cherries or raspberries, to make kriek and framboise Asian Rice Alcohols: Chinese Chiu and Japanese Sake Sweet Moldy Grains The peoples of eastern Asia developed their own distinctive form of alcohol, one that the rest of the world is coming to appreciate more and more It’s not exactly a wine, because it’s fermented from starchy grains, mainly rice But it’s not exactly a beer either, because the grain starch is not digested into fermentable sugars by grain enzymes Instead, Asian brewers use a mold to supply the starchdigesting enzymes, and the mold digests the grain starch at the same time that the yeasts are converting the sugars into alcohol The resulting liquid can reach an alcohol concentration of 20%, far stronger than Western beers and wines Chinese chiu and Japanese sake don’t have the grapey fruitiness or acidity of wine, nor the malt or hop characters of beer Because it’s made from only the starchy heart of the rice grain, sake is perhaps the purest expression of the flavor of fermentation itself, surprisingly fruity and flowery even though no fruit or flower has come near it Why and how did Asians come up with this alternative to sprouting grains? The historian H T Huang suggests that the key was their reliance on small, fragile millet and rice grains, which unlike barley and wheat are easily and usually cooked whole Huang speculates that leftover cooked grains were frequently left sitting out long enough to get moldy; and because there are air spaces in a mass of grains, the oxygen-requiring molds would have grown well and digested starch ...resulting liquid can reach an alcohol concentration of 20%, far stronger than Western beers and wines Chinese chiu and Japanese sake don’t have the grapey fruitiness or acidity of wine, nor the malt or hop characters of beer... characters of beer Because it’s made from only the starchy heart of the rice grain, sake is perhaps the purest expression of the flavor of fermentation itself, surprisingly fruity and flowery even though no fruit or flower has... come near it Why and how did Asians come up with this alternative to sprouting grains? The historian H T Huang suggests that the key was their reliance on small, fragile millet and rice grains, which unlike barley and wheat are