• 2 days ago
Reporter Joe Colbrook went behind the scenes at the Sanyou distillery in St Leonards, where three friends are turning the market for baijiu - China's national spirit - on its head. Video by Joe Colbrook, photos from Wikimedia Commons/Wellcome Collection, supplied
Transcript
00:00It's a clear spirit with a lot of flavour.
00:04It's said that good things come in threes, and inside the seemingly ordinary warehouse
00:09that couldn't be more true, as a trio of entrepreneurs seek to shake up the market
00:13for the world's most consumed spirit.
00:16Sanyu itself was formed by myself and two business partners.
00:21Originally it was myself and Tim Yee, who's our young Chinese-Australian partner in the
00:25business.
00:26We actually met because my mum was teaching his mum English.
00:31Tim's lived in Australia since he was about 15, so has a really great cross-cultural connection
00:35with Australia and China.
00:38We together travelled to China to learn how to make baijiu in the Maotai town, which is
00:42the traditional town.
00:43And when we came home we thought we knew how to make baijiu, but it turns out we didn't.
00:48So our third partner is Chris De Bono, who is somewhat of a fermentation expert.
00:53We learned the actions and he knew the science, so together we formed Sanyu and we just started
01:01from there.
01:02Baijiu, which translates literally as burning liquor, has a history stretching back millennia,
01:09with the first distillery processes being developed in Han Dynasty China sometime between
01:14202 BC and about 220 AD, with the first modern versions of the drink being developed through
01:22the Tang Dynasty, which lasted from 618 to 907 AD.
01:28Baijiu making is everything you imagine in a Western spirit flipped on its head.
01:33So everything is done on solid grain, no liquids are seen until the very end.
01:38So it's a two-stage process for traditional baijiu making.
01:41So the first stage is making what they call chou, which is a bit like a sourdough starter.
01:48We take Tasmanian wheat, crush it and then wet it and squish it into these brick shapes
01:57and then we put it into our incubators for 30 days and in that process it goes through
02:02a natural fermentation.
02:03The second stage is using red sorghum.
02:07We access our red sorghum from New South Wales and to use that we soak and steam that to
02:12around the consistency of cooked rice and then cool that and then we add the crushed
02:20chou to that and then we take that and we ferment it about six tonne at a time in our
02:25distillery for 45 days.
02:28We remove the solid grain from the pits and we run it through our still.
02:35So this is the only still of this kind in Australia but there's obviously many of them
02:39in China and it operates a bit like a dumpling steamer really.
02:44So our steam boilers deliver steam into the bottom basin of the still and then the middle
02:51section of our still is filled up with the solid grain in a slow and delicate process
02:57to make sure you don't create a plug and then the steam runs through the grain, the steam
03:02goes into the hood through the line arm and then down through our high flow condenser
03:07and out the end comes our baijou.
03:09So the final stage of traditional baijou making is the ageing.
03:15The baijou is aged in clay pots, always in a sort of cool and dank sort of space like
03:21often a traditional baijou distillery is next to a cave system and the idea there is the
03:27pot stays cool, the spirit volatiles come up through the paper and condense onto the
03:36plastic and then drip down onto the paper and give it a slow wicking process which gives
03:40it a really slow oxidisation process which is how this spirit ages.
03:48So it's a clear spirit with a lot of flavour.
03:53Baijou is much like whisky, the longer the better and you can't over age baijou because
03:58it's in the clay pots unlike whisky and other spirits.
04:01In Mautai the minimum age is three years but really the desirable bottles that really
04:08go up the value chain are 10 or 15 years old.
04:11We've been finding our way around the market, it's been interesting so far.
04:14We've had a year old bottle for sale just on our website and I'd say that our customer
04:18base is two thirds Australian Chinese and a third just interested spirits drinkers.
04:29We're just trying to find that market at the moment but it's definitely there, it's operating
04:36in a different space to a lot of the other markets like whisky and things.