As someone who spends a lot of time in liquor stores, there aren’t many occasions when I can walk into the spirits section of a boutique retailer and find myself overwhelmed with both uncertainty and curiosity. When you’re familiar with just about every major brand of Scotch, Bourbon, gin, vodka, Tequila, mezcal, and rum, the surprises are few and far between. Yet, when I walk the international spirits aisle at Mission, past the countless Arak labels and Armenian brandies, I’m really at a loss when I get to the baijiu. I find myself staring at the shelves in a stupor—hypnotized, wallowing in the wonderment of unfamiliarity and the endless sea of red-labeled hooch.
Unlike the single malt section, where I can give you a summary of just about every brand on the shelf, I’m much less confident when facing the Chinese baijiu selection. I know very little about these bottles, and yet I know there are tons of people drinking this stuff, piling cases of baijiu into their shopping carts, stocking up for the weekend like I might do with Buffalo Trace or Beefeater. What I know or don’t know is irrelevant, however; because baijiu is the most consumed spirit in the world. Literally translating as “white alcohol,” the Chinese juggernaut might still be an anomaly to many in the United States, but to about 1.5 billion abroad it’s the only booze that matters. You wanna know what people are actually drinking rather than simply taking pictures of for social media? It’s baijiu.
What is baijiu exactly, you ask? I’d rather not generalize too much because it can come in many forms, but if pressed I’d say that baijiu is typically a sorghum-based spirit that is fermented using a rotting grain-based paste called qu before being distilled on a pot still and aged in clay jars, sometimes in an underground cellar or even buried in the earth. It’s often blended for consistency, as batches can vary greatly in flavor, and it can come in as light as 35% ABV or as fiery and potent as 70%. It can be as plain as vodka, or as complex and potent as the funkiest of mezcals. Almost everything I know about baijiu I’ve learned from reading Derek Sandhaus’ book on the subject, and spending at least $500+ on various high-end expressions. Believe it or not, China’s best baijiu expressions are not cheap. A 200ml of Kweichou Moutai will cost you at least $200, as will a 375ml of Wuliangye. That’s $400 plus tax for not even a standard bottle’s worth of clear booze.
Like I said before, trying to summarize a category with enormous variation is difficult to do in a few paragraphs, but Sandhaus breaks down baijiu into four types based on aromas: strong, light, sauce and rice. Strong is the most popular category, followed by light, then sauce, and finally rice as it’s often made with glutenous rice rather than sorghum. There are indeed further sub-categories, but I have to think a deep dive of baijiu is going to be too much for those of you just checking in casually. I wanna get to some of the brand specifics before bogging you down in production details and styles. There’s a lot of very interesting cultural information and history that make drinking baijiu a lot of fun.
The Château Lafite of baijiu is called Kweichou Moutai and it’s known as the “national liquor” of China. Clocking in at 53%, it’s been served at every major state dinner for the last century, consumed by everyone from Ho Chi Minh to Richard Nixon to Barack Obama. Henry Kissinger once famously said, “I think if we drink enough Moutai, we can solve anything.” It’s made entirely of fermented sorghum and it smells like roasted soy sauce with other intensely fragrant notes that I am at a loss to describe. In no way is it for the light of heart. The Château Latour of baijiu would probably be Wuliangye, a fermentation of sorghum, rice, glutenous rice, wheat and corn that is the absolute polar opposite of Moutai: fruity on the nose with perfumy notes of pineapple, flowers and nail polish. Translated as “five grain liquid,” it tastes like nothing comparable in the spirits world. High-ester Jamaican rum might be as close as you could get.
How do you drink baijiu? You pour it in a glass and sip or shoot it. When do you drink baijiu? Before, during, and after dinner. How much Baijiu is being consumed on earth? About 1.2 billion cases a year, which is roughly three times the global consumption of vodka. And yet Baijiu is far from flavorless! It’s the most potent, mind-bending, genre-defying spirit in existence and yet most of us in the booze business know almost nothing (if anything) about it. It is served at exactly zero of the bars and restaurants I regularly frequent, and most of my local retailers sell none whatsoever. To me, the entire category is like a candy store full of exotic delights I’ve yet to experience. And that’s before digging deeper into other rice-based Asian spirits like shochu or awamori, the ancient spirit of Okinawa.
For those who think I’m kidding, I invite anyone and everyone to take a trip to Hawaii Supermarket in the San Gabriel Valley, circle the parking lot for ten minutes trying to find a spot, and watch the hoards of shoppers at play, filling their carts with Chinese booze. People are drinking this. More people, to be accurate, than are drinking any other spirit in the world. There’s a lot to unpack. The spectrum of flavor profiles is so wide it’s sometimes hard to believe these spirits are in the same genre. For me, I get a thrill out of every sip. It’s the great unknown; the next great frontier for hopeless booze adventurers like myself.
-David Driscoll