Jorhat (Assam), June 10: The odorous rice beer downed with relish among different communities in the rural areas of the Northeast may soon find universal acceptance with its strong smell deodorised, quality enhanced, its nutritional contents tabled and a standard hygiene making process codified.

The food and nutrition department under the College of Home Science and biotechnology department under the College of Agriculture here is working on a scheme in this regard.

Working on the project to find a way to standardise ethnic fermented rice beer and rationalise the indigenous technology used in the making process, Mridula Saikia Barooah, professor in the department of food and nutrition, said the aim was to popularise rice beer along the lines of pheni and toddy.

Saikia Barooah said rice beer, known by different names like lao pani, sulai, sai mod by different communities, was already very popular in the rural areas but till now there has not been any proper documentation in order to protect the developed and improvised indigenous technologies.

“If required, we can improve the quality and nutritional value with additives and the smell, so offensive to many, can be lessened by deodorising so that the large quantity of the liquor consumed here can form a nutritious domestic beverage and can be sold outside like Japanese sake. This will improve the economic status of the producers,” she said.

“Till now our study has found that 101 herbs, leaves, barks of trees and other ingredients go into the making of rice beer but how much of nutrients from these go into the liquor is being studied,” she said.

Saikia Barooah said some of the common herbs like mani moni, ban jaluj, jeteli poka, jutha dhekia bihlongoni and others were commonly used in traditional medicine to cure various ailments and that an analysis was on to find whether these ingredients percolate into the drink. “The biotechnology department has found some good microbes but the collation is yet to be done,” she said.

Explaining the system of making rice beer, she said about 30 to 40 of these ingredients, depending on the availability, are mixed with freshly cooked rice mostly of the glutinous variety and yeast contained in a culture starter sample. This is then made into balls or tablets and kept on hay or bihlongoni fern and covered until the yeast forms in all of them after four or five days and then they are dried in the sun and stored for future use. These starters are added to the cooked glutinous rice which is cooled on a huge bamboo tray or banana leaf and then transferred to earthen or bamboo containers after which it liquefies into alcohol in two to four weeks and drips down into another container. The colour of the liquor takes on from the ingredients in the starters and rice.

Saikia Barooah said sometimes hay is burnt inside the pot to sterilise it prior to fermenting the rice and this imparts an ashy taste known as sai mod in the Mising community. “In some houses, however, it was found that the vessels were full of flies and maggots. We have conducted two training sessions, the last one in May, in hygienic preparation of the beer among representatives of different communities,” the professor said.

If prepared keeping hygiene in mind, the rice beer can be stored and aged, thereby increasing its value like old champagne.

The consortium lead centre of the three-year project is the Indian Institute of Crop Production Technology, Thanjavur, and is funded by Indian Council of Agricultural Research through the national agricultural innovation project.