TracyFood

Foto Friday: Nepali adult beverage edition. 7 March 2008 4:55 pm

Posted by Tracy in : nepal, pictures, travel , trackback

Happy weekend, everybody! Today’s featured picture is from 23 October 2007, at a lodge in Monjo where we camped on the grounds but ate in the dining room and at lunch, were invited into the kitchen to see something super-cool:

Rakshi in progress! So. The usual local alcoholic specialty available just about everywhere we trekked was home-brewed chhung beer, fermented rice or millet porridge strained and diluted to drinkability with hot water. The device above takes chhung to the next level: it’s a reverse double boiler of sorts, with the chhung in the bottom part, boiling, then condensing in the middle container with the help of some cold water on top. Nawang (eating lunch on the right of that picture) advised us against sampling this rakshi even freshly distilled as it was, on the off chance that it was contaminated with untreated water from that top condenser. Dangit!

(To be fair, we did get to taste rakshi at a very fancy dinner in Kathmandu, but it would’ve been so cool to try the local version. And then there was tongba millet beer back at the Hotel Utse, but that’s a story for another post.)