Here I'd like to introduce my latest obsession in booze. The first bottle here is the first taste of this stuff I had.
This was given to me by a friend who'd travelled to Inner Mongolia and wanted to bring back something unique and unexpected. He succeeded beyond his wildest dreams.
Now this particular bottle is not an exceptionally good one. It's 38%/76 proof and it's the tourist-grade stuff that's sold in souvenir shops. The bottle inside even had just a crimped, beer bottle-style cap! (Luckily I had kept the cork-based cap from a bottle of Wild Turkey for random reasons and it fit this bottle perfectly.)
Still, despite not being brilliant quality, it was a fascinating flavour. This stuff is distilled 马奶酒/kumiss, kumiss being a "wine" or "beer"-like substance (for want of a better term) made from mare's milk.
Yes, horse milk.
Traditional kumiss is consumed in roughly the same space that people drink wine or beer with a meal. This stuff, however, is double-distilled after fermentation to give you the essence of kumiss without the cloudy stuff. The resulting flavour is ... well, I describe traditional 白酒/baijiu as "what diesel would taste like if diesel tasted good". This stuff tastes like what diesel would taste like if diesel tasted good and were flavoured by additional whey.
Now, as I said, this was tourist-grade stuff and there were some unpleasant aftertastes in it. I wanted to test if this were an inevitable part of kumiss liquor or if this was just an expression of the quality. The stuff tasted good enough, but I wanted to see if I could get more. I went to Taobao and hunted around for some good stuff: on the expensive side of the mid range. I found this:
This is a much higher grade of kumiss liquor. Distilled to 52%, it could go one of two ways: either the alcohol content would distract from the flavours by its burn (thus removing the awesome parts I liked) or the good flavours would be more concentrated and shine through past the burn.
I'm happy to report that the latter is true.
Despite having a lot more alcohol, thus with the commensurate increase in alcohol burn, the awesome flavours of kumiss far overpower the pain. If anything this stuff goes down smoother and with less of a jolt than the weaker stuff. It has rapidly grown to become my favourite form of hooch (to the point that with all the extra drinking that Tricky Dicky, the asthmatic pit bull is forcing on me I'm rapidly running out and will have to order more). I'll definitely be re-ordering this, and I'll be trying out a bottle that's on the lower end of the expensive scale as well.