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I want to record and share my plans for making wines from novel (to me) grains in the next few months. To recap, I’ve fermented fruits and sweet glutinous rice for a few years now, and done several batches of kodo millet fermentation.

I want to start fermenting corn meal – bought myself a 2lb cornmeal bag at target –, oats, sorghum, and rye. Corn is a common ingredient in local grain wines in Nepal, it’s called ‘makai ko jaar’. I’ve found a few recipes for that on Youtube, so I’m not experimenting with anything unusual there. I expect it to be quite similar to rice wine, but with more corn-like flavor.

As per oats, they are not completely unknown to American homebrewers’ beer recipes. I’ve even seen oat-based beers in liquor stores. I am however yet to see too many recipes or products for oats fermented in the sino-tibetic tradition. It will be interesting to see how rice mold works on oats. If it’s unsatisfactory, I might have to start work on culturing my own oat-centric mold culture!

The other grains I want to work with – sorghum and rye – will likely be more complicated than corn and oats. They are whole grains (unlike rice, corn and oats, which are polished and processed) which mean they take a lot of water to cook, and don’t turn to mush or break down easily under normal cooking conditions. I imagine there might be the need of additional processing to get to the regular wine stage.

To remind ourselves, I’m not using malted grains or powders for these powders, but molds and their enzymes and yeast, according to traditions of South & East Asian cultures. I don’t know what to expect, because I haven’t seen examples on youtube, or read many papers to get a good idea. I’m treating this as an exploratory experimentation. There’s going to be many disappointments and false starts. To cut my losses, I will be starting by working with only a pound or two of dry grains at a time. It’ll be interesting regardless of what the outcome is!

The other set of experiments I’m excited about is approaching the rye and sorghum ferments from the kodo millet angle! These grains don’t break down easily and don’t get mushy, even when fermented. I’m thinking of treating them like how the Limbu people in Nepal process and drink kodo millet wines. This process depends on solid state fermentation. The idea is to ferment the whole grains for three to six weeks, and come consumption time, steep them in hot water and drink like hot tea, like Tongba (the kodo millet drink of Limbus).

I’m excited about that. If it works out, it’ll be a genuine innovation. Since these grains have a much softer hull than millet, there’ll be way more slurry, and it won’t work exactly the same, that’s for sure. But even if we get half way there, an attempt at introducing an entirely new way of consuming grain wine (or alternately, using a known technique for entirely new class of grains) will be a fun one!