Highland barley wine, called "Qiangqiang" in Tibetan, is a low-fermented wine made from highland barley, a major grain produced on the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau.
As one of the four special delicacies of the Tibetan people, highland barley wine (highland barley wine, butter tea, tsamba, and yak meat are known as the four special foods of the Tibetan people) with a unique taste that everyone who has tasted it is unforgettable, let us feel the unique charm of highland barley wine.
There are three kinds of barley wine produced on the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau: rice wine, white wine, and health wine, and the process is somewhat similar to that of glutinous rice water wine.
The process is material selection, green bare pretreatment, washing and foaming, cooking, cooling and mixing, entering the tank to produce alcohol, extrusion and filtration, aging, blending, high temperature sterilization, product packaging and other processes.
It is characterized by the fact that the raw materials used are mainly naked, the amount of lower koji in the cooling and mixing process is 0.5% of the dry weight of the raw materials, the fermentation temperature in the fermentation process is 15~36C, and the fermentation time is 3~40 days.
1. There is a lot of powder, dust, etc. after the processing of barley, so it must be washed repeatedly before making wine until the water is clear.
2. After washing, soak in cold water for 8-10 hours, then put it to soak in grain water and wash off the acid water.
3. Pour the cleaned barley into the brewing equipment layer by layer for cooking.
4. After a short time after the feeding is completed, it will be on the atmosphere, cover the lid and steam for another 20 minutes, sprinkle water to make the rice grains absorb water, cover the lid and continue to steam for about 40 minutes, and the barley will be steamed (it is ripe but not very rotten as the standard).
5. Shovel the steamed barley out of the barrel, put it on the cooling bed, cool it to about 33-36 degrees, add the koji to ferment, the temperature is very critical when the koji is lowered, and the barley wine fermented too high will become bitter.
6. After 48-72 hours, the saccharification of highland barley wine is completed, and it can be drunk directly after filtration. Of course, you can also put a bamboo wine basket in it without filtering and drink it with a spoon whenever you want.
It is said that the water added to the barley wine is the snow water of the sacred mountain, and the water will be added three times: the first pot of water should be added to be two inches higher than the fermented barley, and the second and third pots of water should be added to the same height as the fermented barley.
Legend has it that the production of barley wine is the liquor brewing process left by Princess Wencheng who married Tubo and passed through this place, which brought the origin of wine culture to Tibet.