Brewing technology of Daohuaxiang wine industry

The quantity of pits and the quality of pit mud determine the brewing ability and liquor quality of liquor. Daohuaxiang Liquor Company has an annual output of 10000 tons of base liquor. Based on traditional technology and scientific and technological innovation, it strives to improve the organic content of pit mud and lay a solid foundation for brewing high-quality base liquor.

In the spring and April of the first year of the new century, Mr. Zhou Henggang, an 84-year-old China liquor master, visited Daohuaxiang, paying special attention to the production technology of the original wine. In the brewing workshop, he took out a small lump of pit mud from the pit, pinched it, looked at its color and smelled its fragrance, and gave it: "This pit mud is quite good. I have seen it in Luzhou, and such good pit mud is rare.

Mud is the foundation of life and the source of all things. Pit mud is the "lifeline" in brewing, and its quality is directly related to the output and quality of base wine. There is a saying in the industry: "the mud of a thousand years is rotten for ten thousand years", which summarizes the great role of pit mud.

As the saying goes, good wine has a good cellar. When you walk into the brewing workshop, you will marvel at the scale of this pit. According to the winemaker, these pits are all made of clay, with 20 cm thick pit mud around and at the bottom, which is the core "equipment" for winemaking. Each batch of raw materials should be fermented in deep pits for 70 days to 140 days. Through repeated rotation, it has become a hotbed for breeding wine. Some people can't help but ask, Daohuaxiang has only been in business for more than ten years, where did you get so much "Millennium mud"? In fact, in the early days of starting a business, Daohuaxiang people once went out to 50 yuan to buy a catty of mud and spent 65,438+10,000 yuan to buy a car full of mud, which is a bit impossible for ordinary people. At the beginning, the cost of the pit alone reached several million yuan. Now, these pit mud is the greatest wealth of Daohuaxiang, and it is also the basis of ensuring the brand quality of Daohuaxiang, because these pit pools and pit mud have formed a large number of unique flora with esterification function. It is these unique microorganisms that form the mellow fragrance of rice flowers. In the Daohuaxiang Brewing Workshop with an annual output of 1 10,000 tons of base liquor, the floor is covered with ancient cyan slate with the same specifications, which is a "local product" that is hard to see in China liquor industry. Walking into the brewing workshop, you will be deeply impressed by the spectacular labor scene, and you will marvel at the magic of nature's creations and the wisdom of Taoxiang people. When building this brewing workshop with an annual output of 1 10,000 tons of base wine, the designer spent a lot of effort. The appearance of each workshop is modeled as a huge wine glass, and six wine glasses symbolize the production capacity of 10,000 tons of base wine.

These bluestone tablets are produced in the local Wulongbao, which is the only place where they are abundant within hundreds of miles of Fiona Fang. Its scientific name is shale, and shale is like a book. After thousands of years of geological changes, it has recorded the mysteries of the universe like an encyclopedia and witnessed the splendid civilization of the Chinese nation for 5 thousand years.

The thickness of these slabs is complete, as thin as paper and as thick as sleepers. Mountain people build walls with these stone slabs and spread them on the roof, which is simple, natural and unique. Quite primitive beauty. They also use slates to make water tanks and granaries, spread floors, and build a "hundred-step ladder" on the slope, giving people a feeling of returning to nature. Living in a stone house is warm in winter and cool in summer.

The bluestone slabs laid on the ground of the rice fragrance brewing workshop also have their own special functions. Blue slate is not as smooth as ceramic tile, and its hardness is better than blue-red brick, unlike cement floor, which changes the microorganism of wine base. It will not produce some impurities due to ground vibration and tool friction, and it is durable. It is by using this unique natural resource that the fragrance of rice flowers spread on the ground of the brewing workshop, which can be described as ingenious.

Immersed in the scene, in the steaming brewing workshop, the winemakers are barefoot on the ground paved with bluestone, enthusiastically shouting the scene of labor. It also shows the characteristics of the production process of rice flower fragrance. Liquor, as a beverage, has its own unique technology. The raw materials used are different, the technology will be different, and the quality of wine is also very different. Most manufacturers brew with one or two kinds of grain as raw materials, which has the characteristics of simple process and short fermentation period. Daohuaxiang uses all kinds of grains to make wine, and it has not changed from beginning to end.

China has a vast territory, the climate is very different, and the drinking habits in the east, west, north and south are also obviously different. Therefore, wine brewed with single grain may sell well in some areas. Rice-flavor Luzhou-flavor liquor is carefully brewed from five kinds of high-quality red sorghum, corn, glutinous rice, rice and wheat. Daohuaxiang series liquor absorbed the advantages of various grains and formed its own characteristics. In the brewing process of rice fragrance, the selected grains are large, uniform and full, and can only enter the brewing process after filtering and sieving. Taking red sorghum as an example, it is necessary to peel off the shell and thin skin of sorghum grains with a threshing machine first, because the tannins contained in the thin skin are easy to produce astringent taste, which affects the taste of liquor. Among the five grains, red sorghum produces strong liquor, rice produces pure liquor, glutinous rice produces alcoholic liquor, wheat produces strong liquor and corn produces sweet liquor, which can meet the needs of the public.

These different grains will produce different trace aromatic components through microbial fermentation and biochemical action, giving wine different flavor characteristics. Therefore, rice fragrant wine absorbs the essence of five grains, is naturally "congenitally sufficient", is rich in trace components and has a comprehensive taste. In addition, the scientific proportion of raw materials has formed the unique style of rice fragrant wine. This is unmatched by wine brewed from a single grain. The fragrance of rice flowers is like this, striving for perfection, never letting go of any subtle link, and dedicating the rich cellar fragrance, sweet and refreshing wine to every consumer. Brewing technology is the core of liquor quality formation. Daohuaxiang liquor-making inherits and develops the traditional solid-state fermentation technology in China, but it is different and unique compared with many domestic wineries: in the details of daily life, people's awareness of self-protection is getting stronger and stronger, and the word "health" has been put in the first place. In the production of liquor, Daohuaxiang Liquor Company insists on starting from the source, focusing on consumers' health, and strictly selecting materials: instead of buying top-grade grain at a high price, it is better to buy top-grade grain at a high price, and all the grain beyond a certain period will not be used, otherwise the quality of liquor will be difficult to reach the top-grade standard. Usually, the grain of liquor manufacturers is directly weighed and put into production after purchasing and warehousing, while the grain of Daoxiang wine needs technical treatment, mechanical hulling and peeling, and then it enters the production link to ensure the best products.

In the process of brewing, a series of techniques such as "layered brewing, layered distillation, quality picking, hierarchical merging" were uniquely implemented. The production and fermentation cycle of Luzhou-flavor Daqu liquor is generally 40-70 days. In this process, because the temperature, moisture and acidity of the upper, middle and lower layers of fermented grains are different from those of pit mud and yellow water, the quality of distilled wine is still different. Furthermore, due to distillation, the styles of wines distilled at different stages are quite different.

In order to distinguish different wine qualities, jars should be combined and stored according to quality, and the rice flower fragrance process should be strictly stratified by quality, distilled in layers, and wine selected. We call this process "choosing the best among the best". This process is completely different from the whole cellar fermented grains, which is taken out at one time, mixed and stacked in layers, and mixed distillation. Wandering in the vast kingdom of liquor, a wide variety of wine cabinets display the products of many manufacturers. These boxes are marked with the words age in a conspicuous position. Although the word "Chen" can arouse the interest of consumers, the longer the word "Chen" lasts, the more unreal it becomes. It is closely related to history, alcohol consumption, production cost, equipment, warehouse, scale and many other factors.

Daohuaxiang Liquor Company adheres to the principle of honesty and seeking truth from facts, and publicly opens its aged wine storage for guests to visit and taste at will. In ten underground storerooms, there are nearly ten thousand clay pots with a capacity of 1 ton. Base wines stored in different years. The altar mouth is wrapped in HongLing, which makes it more and more simple. There is a label on the jar indicating the production date, capacity and alcohol content. The experience of traditional liquor technology proves that the basement can adjust the temperature and humidity. The wine in the pottery altar absorbed the "earth aura" in the semi-basement wine storage, and gradually became more mellow and delicious. After a certain year of underground storage, according to the coordination of various physical and chemical indexes, the mature original wine was transported to Berlin Riverside Factory 16 open-air 300-800 tons stainless steel blending tank, blended and bottled. These huge jars can store 20,000 tons of high-quality base wine and become a "aging" base.

The "six-year aging" and "ten-year aging" introduced by Daohuaxiang in the market are genuine, sweet and refreshing. It can be said that after ten years of grinding a sword, old wine is more mellow.