Category: baijiu

In this post, I'm going to combine some material from different places. Previous posts have been: 

• Baijiu Production in Relation to Other Spirits
• Regional Differences in Baijiu Style and Production
• Baijiu Production: Qu and Fermentation
• Baijiu Backgrounder: A Brief History Lesson
• Repetitive and Continuous Fermentation and Distillation in Baijiu
• A Visit to the Luzhou Laojiao Baijiu Distillery in China

There are at least 12 recognized categories of baijiu, distilled liquor from China: Strong aroma, light aroma, sauce aroma, and rice aroma. Strong aroma makes about 75% of the market, and these four categories in total make up about 90% of the baijiu market. Other categories are mostly combination of these four categories. 

In this post, I'm going to outright steal content from the Ming River Baijiu website, and combine it with fermentation/distillation information that I wrote about in my previous post "Repetitive and Continuous Fermentation and Distillation in Baijiu." 

If you haven't read previous posts, just know that qu is the combination of yeast, mold, and bacteria that breaks down grains and ferments them at the same time. It is used in all baijiu. You can read more about qu in this post if you'd like. 

The first paragraph in each of the below descriptions comes from the Ming River website, and the rest of it comes from me. 

Light Aroma Baijiu

Light-aroma baijiu is most popular in northern China. It is made from sorghum and sometimes uses qu made from barley and peas. It is fermented in stone pots or pits, and it is best known for short production cycles with minimal aging periods. It has a light body with floral notes and the mellow sweetness of dried fruit.

There are two types of light aroma baijiu. In the simplest, erguotou, the sorghum grains are steamed, fermented, and distilled just once. For fenjiu, new rice husks are added to the pot still along with fermented sorghum grains. After the first distillation the fermented/distilled grains and new rice husks are fermented again (fresh qu is added) to extract more alcohol from the mash.  Each of the distillation runs are stored (and probably aged) separately.

Strong Aroma Baijiu

Strong-aroma baijiu is popular throughout China, but most closely associated with Sichuan Province. It uses wheat qu and continuous fermentation in earthen pits. It is distilled from sorghum, sometimes in combination with other grains. It is notable for a robust body with notes of tropical fruit, anise and pepper.

In strong aroma baijiu, there is no production cycle that ends at a certain point, as in the other baijiu categories – it is endless. At each distillation, new grains (sorghum alone or a mixture of other grains) is added to the still along with fermented grains. After distillation, the grains are taken out of the still, put back into the fermentation pits with more qu, and refermented. Then it's redistilled with some fresh grains, refermented, and on and on.

Ming River baijiu is strong aroma baijiu, made at the Luzhou Laojiao distillery where the flagship product is 1573 National Cellar. 

Sauce Aroma Baijiu

Sauce-aroma baijiu, as in soy sauce, comes from Guizhou Province and is made from sorghum fermented in pits lined with stone bricks. Its mash is fermented and distilled eight times in the course of a year. The flavor is rich and umami, with notes of mushroom, caramel and bitter herbs.

We're talking about Moutai here. For sauce aroma baijiu there are 8 cycles of fermentation and distillation, but only a few of the cycles get new grains added. Sorghum is first steamed,  then fermented in mud-sealed pits for a month. After fermentation, equal parts fermented sorghum and new unfermented sorghum are distilled, and then the solids are refermented. This is then distilled a second time with fresh grains added to the still. From this point on the mash continues to be refermented after distillation with additional qu, but no new grains are added. The same mash is being fermented and distilled over and over. 

The whole production cycle takes one year to complete- and then the spirit is aged (each distillation run separately) and blended. Compare that to say vodka, which ferments a couple days then can be distilled and bottled and the whole thing done within a week. 

Rice Aroma Baijiu

Rice-aroma baijiu is associated with southeastern China, particularly Guangdong and Guangxi provinces. It is distilled from rice fermented with rice-based small qu. Unique to this category is the occasional use of continuous distillation. It has a light body similar to vodka, with notes of flowers and honey.

Rice is steamed, fermented, and distilled in either pot or now in continuous stills. This is closest to other spirits without the repeat fermentation described above.

I lied in the title of this post. It should be called "A Visit to One of the Luzhou Laojiao Baijiu Distilleries," because they operate 36 of them! If you haven't been following along on my series of posts about baijiu, here are the ones I've done so far: 

• Baijiu Production in Relation to Other Spirits
• Regional Differences in Baijiu Style and Production
• Baijiu Production: Qu and Fermentation
• Baijiu Backgrounder: A Brief History Lesson
• Repetitive and Continuous Fermentation and Distillation in Baijiu

The last post was the first real introduction to "strong aroma" baijiu, which is the specialty of Luzhou Laojiao. I'll touch on it again on this one. 

Luzhou Laojiao makes the flagship 1573 baijiu, aka National Cellar 1573.  They also make the new product Ming River Baijiu that was developed for the export market. I visited the distillery on behalf of Ming River. 

Luzhou, the city, is located along the Yangtze River in the Sichuan Province. 

We flew in from Beijing, passing over the most magnificent dramatic mountain scenery. I took about 100 photos on the plane ride over the three or so hours. It looked like the below photo for about 80% of the flight. Majestic.  

The first distillery we visited, which is the one open to the public, has been operating since 1573. They say the city grew up around the distillery and I can definitely see that – the facility seemed tucked around a corner in the heart of the city with a highway nearly running over it, yet somewhere on-site they had additional workshops (distilleries) and an aging cave cut into the hillside.

This is the visitor's center and cafe.  The highway is to the top left. 

The part of the facility open to tours is a huge warehouse. Tours walk around two sides of it, watching production below through glass windows. In this facility, everything is done by hand. With 36 distilleries to choose from, naturally the company allows tours only of the oldest – more modern machinery is used at others. 

As you can see in the below pictures, the room is covered with mud mounds and central pot stills. The mud mounds are all actually square pits dug into the ground. They're filled with grains and qu (yeast, mold, and bacteria) and ferment as solids in the pits. They're filled to overflowing so that they look like mounds, then covered with a layer of mud to seal them. 

The mud on top of the pits is sprinkled with some distillate (probably tails) to keep it moist, and thus sealed against oxygen so that the fermenting grains don't turn into vinegar. As mentioned in a previous post, when fermentation is completed in 3-4 months (most of the year, but can be up to 6 months in winter), the grains partially collapse and the top of the pits sag. Then it's time to dig them up and distill them. 

All of the pits on site are at least 200 years old, with 4 of them dating to 1573. (Some but not all distillate in the 1573 brand is made in these pits.) They've been in continuous operation all that time, since that's the unique aspect of strong aroma baijiu. The Luzhou Laojiao company owns over 10,000 fermentation pits(!) in 36 "workshops" (distilleries). 1619 of their pits are over 100 years old. 

Unlike other spirits where the bragging rights are on the length of time the spirit spends aging, in strong aroma baijiu the bragging rights are on the age of the fermentation pits. 

Distilling

The stills here hold 1000 kg of grains per load, which produces 50 liters of baijiu at 68%, which is then watered down before bottling (not sure about before aging).   

Our group was super lucky and was able to see a second distillery on the same site, not open to tourists. We don't have permission to share pictures from that distillery, which is a real shame because it was incredible and we were able to walk among the pits and speak with the distiller. Not sure how long we were supposed to be in there but we lingered more than an hour and we saw an entire distillation cycle. 

In this second, smaller facility, there were 21 pits and just one still in the room. They told us that each pit holds enough fermenting grain to make 14 distillation runs – so they dig up a pit that's finished fermenting, and it takes them 14 distillation cycles to process it all before the grains are put back into the same pit with some new grains to ferment again. 

In strong aroma baijiu, there is a single distillation. The distiller said the heads cuts are at about 72% and the heart is 68% – same as in the public distillery. 

Here you can see that the distiller is using a pitchfork to pull the grains out of the still after distillation, and loading them onto a wheelbarrow. It's all done by hand at this distillery. 

In the foreground is the top of the still temporarily off the still base so that it can be unloaded and reloaded. The four pits in the back are the ones dating to the year 1573.

Each distillation cycle takes only about 1 hour, but the distiller said that it's really only 10-15 minutes of distillation (!) to extract the alcohol. After that's done, they toss buckets of water onto the grains in the still and the remaining time is for the gelatinization of the unfermented grains that were mixed in with the fermented grains. [see the previous post to learn about the continuous fermentation process.]

So if they ran continuously, each pit would take about 14 hours to distill, plus time to shovel the grains in and out of the still, which is done by hand.  

Aging facility 

We also visited one of the aging facilities. This one was a series of tunnels dug into the base of a mountain. The tunnels were once the homes of bandits, then they were used as bomb shelters in the war with Japan, then they became food storage facilities. They've been used to age baijiu for more than 50 years now. 

We weren't able to take pictures inside the caves due to dangers of explosion- in fact we had to touch a static electricity removal machine on the way in. This mountain is located near the convergence of two rivers and the rocks are porous, allowing for a stable temperature and humidity conditions year-round inside.

The entrance to the aging tunnels in the mountain. 

The entrance to the tunnels. Smaller, older aging vessels are at the front. You can see the ones on the right are shaggy with mold. The pipes are used to move liquids in and out.  

Zooming in on the entrance, you can see the larger vessels begin after the arch. The tunnels go wayyyy back. 

In these caves were stored many thousands of large terracotta vessels that are about 5 feet tall. Each one of the standard size vessels inside holds 1000 liters (about $500,000 worth of baijiu). These tunnels were three pots wide and seemed to go far into the mountain – we walked into one tunnel then took an interior loop and back out the same entrance. Luzhou Laojiao has about 7 km of tunnels held in three different aging caves. One of them is located on the site of the distillery we visited earlier.

The vessels were covered in black flaky mold that looks like peeling paint. The dripping ceilings in the interior of the tunnels washes away some of the mold. The vessels are covered at the top with a paper that is waterproof so that the alcohol inside won't become diluted with drops from the ceiling, but it is breathable to let alcoholic vapors evaporate. 

The vessels visible at the front of the tunnel are aging baijiu for the longest amount of time, some 50 to 60 years. They have thicker mold on the outside than the interior vessels. 

The vessels are not moved to empty and fill them, but baijiu is pumped into them. 

According to Derek Sandhaus, three things are happening during aging:

• Oxidation of aldehydes
• Evaporation of higher alcohols 
• Concentration of flavor via the angel's share, which is only about .8 to 1 percent ethanol and about .5% total volume per year. 

I forgot to ask if the baijiu is diluted at all before aging. 

Blending

After aging in terracotta containers, the baijiu is blended. We headed to another facility that looked like corporate offices and meeting center to have a session with the master blender of Ming River Baijiu. She is the next in line to be master blender of all of Luzhou Laojiao. 

We did a little blending exercise where we added a base of younger baijiu with mere drops of baijiu aged up to 50 years (out of the syringes). It was dramatic what a tiny bit of long-aged baijiu could provide -deep, farm/barn earthy musty base notes. 

At the blending exercise they told us about the legacy of master blenders at Luzhou Laojiao. They consider the first to be the creator of "big qu" baijiu in the 1300s, and a later one to be the inventor of the pit fermentation method/strong aroma baijiu in the 1400s. A later blender was the founder of the pits at the distillery dating to 1573. 

One final note about filtration: According to our hosts, baijiu isn't chill filtered or charcoal filtered (at least Ming River is not); only a particle filter is used. 

Stay tuned for more baijiu content, I'm not done yet! 

In previous posts, we've covered Baijiu Production in Relation to Other Spirits,  Regional Differences in Baijiu Style and Production, and  Baijiu Production: Qu and Fermentation.

I realized I should take a step back and talk briefly about how baijiu developed and where it stands today. This information was gathered from the book Baijiu: The Essential Guide to Chinese Spirits by Derek Sandhaus and from my trip to the Luzhou Laojiao distillery in Luzhou where Ming River Baijiu is produced. 

One interesting (but honestly not super relevant to the rest of this post) fact that stood out to me (as I'm doing some global drink history research) is that in other ancient cultures, people drank alcohol (beer, wine, and later spirits mixed into water) because drinking water was generally unsafe. I just finished the book Drink: A Cultural History of Alcohol and it's full of hilarious insults directed at "water drinkers." In China, however, there was less of a need for the disinfecting power of alcohol because people drank boiled water and tea. 

In more relevant information, the development of qu, the cluster of grains inoculated with yeast, bacteria, and mold I wrote about in my last post, dates back to the Han Dynasty of 206BC-220AD. Alcohol made from qu is called jiu and grain beer made with qu is called huangjiu ('yellow alcohol'). Until baijiu was modernized, huangjiu was considered a more premier beverage. Today you can still purchase huangjiu in China.

Distillation technology was probably imported to China from the Middle East or the Mongols (anywhere from 960 to 1368), and the word 'baijiu' simply means 'white alcohol' (distilled alcohol). 

Many thousands of small distilleries existed (and apparently more than 10,000 still exist!) in China, making spirits with regional grains. When the communists took power beginning in 1949, they nationalized, industrialized, and upgraded the technology in the industry: proper techniques were codified (having been mostly house secrets at each distillery previous) and quality control was upgraded. Individual distilleries were formed into large collective companies. 

In the 1960s, the distillers at Luzhou Laojiao (the company that I visited) trained many other distillers how to make their style of baijiu – strong aroma baijiu. Today this style accounts for about 75% of baijiu sales. (Kweichow Moutai, the top-selling and most famous baijiu brand, is not strong aroma but 'sauce aroma' baijiu.)

Later into the 1970s with new economic policies, more distilleries opened up, new brands were created, and baijiu was no longer a regional beverage but one imported between the various provinces of China. The styles of baijiu were also made official – there are more than 12 official baijiu styles, though the big four that I'll write about later make up approximately 90% of all baijiu sold. 

So what we have now are some huge companies/brands that own many of the original small distilleries. The Luzhou Laojiao company, for example, currently consists of 36 "workshops" (distilleries), plus combined aging facilities. Their various brands are made up of blends from their various workshops. 

Map of Luzhou Laojiao workshops.

Today, according to a report in November 2018 by Brand Finance Spirits as discussed in The Spirits Business, four of the five "world's most valuable spirits" were baijiu. Moutai is #1 and Luzhou Laojiao is #5. The only non-Chinese spirit in the top five is Johnnie Walker, coming in at #4.

Back to baijiu! We began the discussion with with Baijiu Production in Relation to Other Spirits then Regional Differences in Baijiu Style and Production. 

Now it's time to talk about some production parameters. Like whiskey, baijiu is distilled fermented grains. The grains include more standard whiskey ones like barley and wheat, plus rice and sorghum. Sorghum is the most popular, followed by rice, sticky rice, then other grains. 

As should be clear from the chart below, the grains can be mixed together or used alone. The vessels in which fermentation takes place can be stone jars or in pitts that may be earthen or lined with bricks.

The fermentation is accomplished not with yeast alone, but with qu. 

Qu is a combination of mold, yeast, and bacteria. It is used not only for baijiu production but also for undistilled Chinese beverages. 

• The mold we could say is similar to koji used in sake and shochu production. It helps break the starches in the grains down into fermentable sugars (saccharification). In whiskey, this is accomplished by adding malted barley and/or enzymes to the grains. 
• The yeast makes alcohol, as it does in other spirits.
• The bacteria helps in flavor development of the alcohol.

Qu is made from clumps of grains that collect the yeast, mold, and bacteria.  It is crushed up and mixed with damp grains to ferment them. There are different types of qu to ferment different styles of baijiu – "big qu" is made in large bricks of usually wheat, sometimes with peas added. Small qu, which is made to ferment rice-based baijiu, is itself made from rice. Sometimes medicinal herbs are added to small qu to imbue the baijiu with medicinal properties. 

As you'd expect, the recipe/incubating conditions/location for each distillery's qu is their closely-guarded secret. I don't know if each distillery produces multiple kinds of qu for their various brands. 

The Wikipedia entry for qu contains a great deal more information. The image of bricks of qu to the right is from the Luzhou Laojiao website.

Fermentation

Beyond than the use of qu, one of the other things that's pretty unique to baijiu is "solid state" fermentation. Rather than fermenting a sugary liquid (as in scotch and rum) or a slurry of liquids and solids mixed together (as in bourbon), in baijiu it's moistened grain solids that ferment. The only other spirit I can think of that's fermented from a solid is grappa.

Grains are steamed, mixed with qu, covered, and then put into the fermentation pit/pot. Fermentation can a long time. For strong aroma and sauce aroma baijiu, I am not sure what the shortest fermentation time is, but I don't think I heard anyone mention less than a month – and at the 1573 brand's distillery (Luzhou Laojiao) they mentioned it was 3-4 months normally and could be up to six months in the winter.  

For 'rice aroma' baijiu, things go much faster – fermentation is only 5-6 days and in modern facilities it is distilled in closer to liquid form in continuous stills. For 'light aroma' baijiu, it can be from 4 days to 4 weeks, depending on the style.

I'll write more about the particular distillery I visited and the production method for strong aroma baijiu in another post, but one quick factoid: At this distillery they bury the moistened grains and qu in earthen pits to let them ferment. The pits are filled to overflowing, piled above the floor level with grains, and  then covered with wet mud which seals it and keeps out oxygen. After the qu does its work, the grains compact a bit and that's how they know fermentation has finished. 

You can see in the picture how the pits in the front right are lower than the rest- those are nearing the end of their fermentation. 

Pretty cool right? That's not even the craziest part. Stay tuned. 

I'm probably going to refer to this table I made about baijiu a lot over several posts, so don't worry too much about taking it all in today. The table lists the properties of the four main styles of baijiu (strong, light, sauce, and rice). There are more styles than this, but they're mostly combinations of these four. 

These properties are not legally binding,  but general and historical properties based on the major producers of each region as described in the book Baijiu: The Essential Guide to Chinese Spirits by Derek Sandhaus . I'll be covering a lot of categories individually here on Alcademics, but should you want to skip ahead, check out DrinkBaijiu.com. 

Today I just want to mention the regions of origin of each of the four main styles, highlighted in pink:

So that corresponds (very) roughly to: