“The purpose of drinking Huangjiu is not only for entertainment, but also to achieve a balanced society by keeping people happy. Huangjiu is a medium that helps the people reach Confucious’ golden mean, which is to balance and compromise each other but also enrich and add color and happiness to the society.” (22-23)

It’s not every week I read a book about liquor, let me tell you!

Loving Chinese culture as I do, though, I was happy to hit on the subject from such a unique angle. This book also fits into another favorite genre of mine, what I call “the biography of things”—alongside other great books like Mark Kurlansky’s Salt or Henry Petroski’s The Evolution of Useful Things. The fact that Huangjiu also whet my appetite for local Chinese dishes, well, I was happy to stumble upon it.

Huangjiu the Beverage

Huangjiu (literally “yellow liquor”) is a style of traditional, grains-based liquor with alcohol content usually between 20-50%. With its storied past, unique and often herbal ingredients, and multiple variations throughout the country, Huangjiu is a thing of cultural pride in China. Each “brand” sources its water and ingredients locally, and they follow different methods handed down over the centuries, so apparently every type is vastly different from the next. Most producers follow the basics, however, like mixing grains with the fermenting agent “qu” and aging the concoction in ceramic pots.

Having lived in China, I’ve seen various aspects of their drinking culture, though where we lived, the local beverages of choice were never Huangjiu but rather rice wine, sticky-rice wine, and sweet-potato wine. I’ll admit that I’ve sampled each over the course of many holidays, and I honestly can’t understand the appeal of any of them! The closest thing to palatable where we lived was the sticky-rice wine, which their pregnant and nursing women drink (yup!). Sweet and with an ABV of like 4%, it’s a fairly safe compromise to have when joining their feasts as a guest.

Huangjiu the Book

I’ve never tasted any of the award-winning varieties of Huangjiu that China offers, but they treat the beverage as a cultural heritage and use it in both worship and celebration—so it’s a piece of Chinese life worth knowing about. I enjoyed Shu Guo’s process of telling us not only of the drink’s many ingredients and production methods, but also of its origin and famous producers. The author also has chapters on Huangjiu Appreciation, Drinking Culture, and Nutrition and Medicine. The most famous producers the author names in this book (with descriptions of their notes, flavors, and pairings) are the following:

• HuXian 户县 from Shaanxi (56-60)
• Jimo 即墨 from Shandong (61-65)
• Xidihu 西渡虎 from Shandong (65-69)
• Danyang Fenggang 丹阳封缸 from Jiangsu (71-74)
• Ganquan 甘泉 from Shaanxi (74-75)
• Fangxian 房县 from Hubei (75-79)
• Jishan Laojiu 吉山老酒 from Fujian (80-81)
• Rugao 如皋 from Jiangsu (82-83)
• Wuxi Huiquan 无锡惠泉 from Suzhou (83-85)
• Longyan Chengang 龙岩沉缸 from Fujian (85-87)
• Shikumen Laojiu 石库门老酒 from Shanghai (88-89)
• Nanfeng 南丰 from Anhui (89)

This book was an easy read, and like I mentioned above, the culture and food portions drew me in the most. I wasn’t fully grasping all the technical lingo of saccharification, etc., so it’s nice that the author provides a glossary in the back.

I had a hard time deciding if this book was originally written in Chinese (and therefore with a Chinese audience in mind) and then translated into English, or if it was in fact originally written in English with foreign readers in mind. The language flowed nicely throughout most of the text, so it’s hard to view it as a translation, though there were spots here and there that reminded me of my old translation days—helping turn research papers written in “Chinglish” into something more legible for English readers.

Its source-language really doesn’t matter, of course. As it is, this English version gives us Westerners an intimate look into a traditional Chinese beverage that most of us had never heard of before. I learned a lot and now have a slightly better appreciation for this aspect of culture that’s always thrown me. There are so many nooks and crannies in local Chinese culture worth exploring—recipes, jobs, methods, tools, traditions, etc. I’d be fascinated to read a book on every one of them! This book was a good start down that road.

©2024 E.T.

Check Out More Books on Food and Cooking:

• The Maple Syrup Book by Janet Eagleson and Tosemary Hasner (2006)
• The Bizarre Truth by Andrew Zimmern (2009)
• Love Food and Live Well by Chantel Hobbs (2010)
• Andrew Zimmern’s Bizarre World of Food by Andrew Zimmern (2011)
• Scars of a Chef by Rick Tramonto with Lisa Jackson (2011)
• My Pizza by Jim Lahey (2012)
• Weeknights with Giada by Giada de Laurentiis (2012)
• Asian Pickles: Japan by Karen Solomon (2014)
• Food a Love Story by Jim Gaffigan (2014)
• Huangjiu: Traditional Chinese Liquor by Shu Guo (2021)