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• join homebrewers association, attend the convention
• red rice yeast
• other grain ferments
• experiment with drinking methods
• more complex recipe, following old, traditional recipes
• using fruit and herbal infusions
• ‘jhhwain khattey’
• chicha, maybe?

Here are my future plans with my fermentation hobby. I’ve been fermenting for the last eight years. I started with kombucha. I made a ton of kimchi and sauerkraut and vinegars and water kefir and milk kefir, and so forth. More lately, I’ve been getting deeper into alcoholic fermentation, specifically making grain wines, even though I don’t drink myself.

Here’s my vision for the future of my brewing hobby. I want to join a home brewing association. I haven’t found many local groups around, and I want to attend the annual Home Brewers Convention. They seem like a cool bunch of folks, and they would surely appreciate my grain wine experimentations.

I want to experiment more with red rice yeast. I’ve tried two batches with red rice yeast, and my experience has been that it completely annihilates carbohydrates and turns it into boozy, stinky liquor. I want to get a better understanding of this technique and make more subdued, drinkable, enjoyable wines. This way, I can create both red and white wine out of rice. I could also experiment using red rice yeast on other grain ferments. Speaking of which, I want to try a lot more grain ferments with new grains. Up to this point, I’ve worked with only rice. I’ve been doing millet grains for the last couple of months, but haven’t tried a new batch really. I have a batch of rye wine fermenting, and I’m eager to see how that turns out. I want to experiment more with corn, sorghum, and a lot more rye and millet, and potentially other grains. So, yeah, I’ll be trying to ferment a lot of other grains in the traditional Eastern style of rice mold fermentation and see where that goes.

I also want to experiment with the drinking methods. What this means is, as I talked about in a different post, makgeolli is made out of millet grains, and it’s drunk like a hot drink. The drinker pours hot water over the grains in a closed mug and drinks with a straw with a kinked end so individual grains don’t come up. I want to see if the same technique can be applied to other grains, maybe sorghum potentially, and so forth. It will be interesting.

I want to start following more complex recipes and follow old traditional ones found in textbooks from Nepal, South Asia, Southeast Asia, and East Asia. They’re often more ritualistic than functional and need intervention every so often. I personally don’t believe that they’ll create a lot of impact on the final outcome, and a lot of those rituals are due to their lack of understanding of the biochemical and physical processes behind fermentation. But I’m willing to be surprised. I’m willing to learn more and to get a more nuanced understanding and a historical, traditional internalization of this culture and tradition. I do still need to start following the old recipes.

Another point: I also want to start using fruits and herbal infusions in my brews. Until now, it’s been mostly one or two different flavors, but I want to add flowers, roots, herbs, and teas into my final brews and flavor them and play around with different combinations of starting grains and techniques and final modifications. The important part to note is, I don’t want the final addition of tinctures and infusions to overwhelm the complexities of the process and the grains. So, there’s a lot of subtlety involved. It will be an interesting journey I’m looking forward to. In the last batch of rice wine I tried, I used a bunch of different dried flowers as flavorings, and people really, really enjoyed the hibiscus-flavored rice wine. I want to keep doing a lot more of that.

Next, there’s a technique in Nepal where you temper your drink, often distilled, with a mixture of ghee and traditional Nepali lichen and herbs. I want to explore more of that, but for rice wines and see if such tempering is going to be adding the complexities and nuances and depth. I have tried it once with ghee and zira, the spice, and it’s been okay, nothing to write home about. But I didn’t go all in on the process then, and I feel there are a lot of options to explore here. Another point, another potential exploration: creating or culturing my own mold cultures. Until now, I’ve bought those rice yeast balls for my ferments and red rice yeast in liquid ricey form in a bottle. Going forward, I want to culture my own molds and experiment, transferring them and training them to get better at consuming different grains. It’s probably going to be a much longer process and less directly rewarding than brewing itself, but in the long term, it will be fruitful because I will have captured a much larger part of the brewing vertical and will be in control of way more variables. It’s a slightly different hobby, though; it’s more biochemistry than home brewing, so it will be interesting to get into. But I have been considering that.

Finally, I want to explore chicha making. When I tell my friends the concept, they are disgusted and don’t want to hear any more of it. But it’s a legitimate cultural tradition from Central and South America that’s gone on for thousands of years, and I want to explore the possibilities there as well. I don’t know where I’ll start from. I don’t know how I’ll be able to convince my friends to chew and spit barely cooked grains into a container, ferment it, and even then, convince somebody to drink the output of that, the brewed output of that. But it will be an interesting journey, and if I’m able to convince people—it’ll be really exciting if people like Sandor Katz and Margie Chicha were able to find volunteers to do that. Hopefully, I will be able to do so as well.