Easy Rice Wine

Rice wine is a sweet, fragrant, alcoholic beverage that works perfectly as a dessert wine. It can also be used as cooking wine.

In this Instructables, you will learn how to make your own, homemade rice wine!

Glutinous rice 500g

https://www.sayweee.com/en/product/Hakubai-Premium-Sweet-Rice/13091

Angel Rice Leaven

https://www.sayweee.com/en/product/Angel-Rice-Leaven-10pcs/18528?category=dried09

Glass bowls

Plastic food wrap

Steamer and cotton steamer clothes

Measuring cup/spoon

Kitchen scale

Optional: Pressure cooker/rice cooker (any pot that can make yogurt, like an Instant Pot). Otherwise, you would need a temperature-controlled environment around 110°F.

Important! Every container, spoon, or other utensils used in this process must be clean, with NO oil. So, wash them with boiling water before usage, and wash your hands thoroughly as well!

Wash the rice until you can pour water in and the water will stay clear. Submerge the rice in water for 12 hours.

It's ready when you're able to easily crush a piece of rice with your finger.

Lay the rice flat and evenly on cotton (NOT PAPER) steamer liners. The steamer liners help steam the rice evenly. Don't layer more than 1 inch of rice. Poke some holes in the rice to let air through more efficiently.

Wait for the water to boil before putting the rice in the steam pot. For 500 grams of rice, it typically takes about 30 minutes of steaming. The resulting rice should be cooked thoroughly, but not too slimy and soft.

Leave the cooked rice out to cool to around 35°C/95°F, then transfer the rice into a glass bowl (ideally one that can fit into your rice cooker). If the rice is too hot, it could kill the microorganisms in the leaven; if the rice is too cold, it could make the fermentation process difficult.

Note: Materials can be used proportionally, but more rice also requires a bigger pot for the steam to cook thoroughly

Boil a cup of water and let it cool to around 35°C/95°F.

Add Angel Rice Leaven to the water and mix.

Every 8-gram bag of Angel Rice Leaven (ARL) can be used on 2000-2500 grams rice. So, we measure about 2g of ARL for our 500g of rice.

Pour the mixture into the rice and stir evenly and thoroughly. Leave some mixture for the next step.

Poke a hole in the center of the bowl with spoon as shown. Add the remaining mixture from the last step into the hole in the center of the bowl.

This will allow you to:

• Check the progress of your rice wine by seeing how much the hole is filled up, and
• Taste test the rice wine

Cover the glass bowl with plastic wrap. Place another bowl beneath the glass bowl (see image 3) so that the rice bowl will be heated evenly. 

Choose the option “Yogurt”. Each cooking period is 8hrs on my cooker, so remember to press the “Yogurt” button again every 8 hrs. After 24 hrs., you can open and start to check/smell/taste the center of the hole. It should be starting to smell and taste like wine. After 2~3 days, the rice wine should be ready.

If you do not have a rice cooker: in winter, you can cover it with a heated blanket (e.g., with a soft hot water bag and replace it with warm water from time to time); in summer, you can put the container in a shady area in the room.

Tip: Once the rice wine gets to its ideal taste, take it out and steam again. This will kill the microorganisms and stop the fermentation process. You can alternatively put it into the fridge to slow down the fermentation process.  If you leave it out, its liquor taste will get stronger but it'll get less sweet.

You can choose to add edible flowers to introduce unique fragrance, like peach, rose, and sweet osmanthus. For fresh flowers, wash them in slightly salty water then steam with the rice from the beginning. With dried flowers, we need to vary the steaming time. Bigger flowers, such as roses, need to be steamed for longer, while smaller flowers, like osmanthus, don't need to be steamed as long. For example, you can add to the rice, mixed well, at around 15 minutes (so they would steam with the rice for 15 minutes), 25 minutes (so they would only steam for 5 minutes).