Getting the [blog] back together
I’m dredging this blog up because I need an outlet to write, and chicha has really grabbed my attention this year. Since I last wrote here, I moved to Washington DC for a couple years, had a kid, and now I’m back in California. Homebrewing as always, and still coaxing life out of the culture that went into a passion fruit “lambic” back in Bolivia (come to see, that culture had S-33, brettanomyces claussenii and Roeselare dregs in it, plus whatever was on the fruit).
Last weekend I tuned into Norsk Kornolfestival, a virtual beer festival on European farmhouse brewing put on by a bunch of Scandinavian brewers. There’s been an explosion in the kveiks that Lars Marius was just beginning to write about at length when I was in Bolivia, and I really need to get his new book that systematizes all of it. I even got a chance to visit Norway six months after my child was born and taste some Voss Bryggeri and Eik og Tid kveik beers! That was a real highlight. Everyone knows about kveik now, and basically everyone in my homebrewing club here in the East Bay knows of and is trying out these yeasts.
Anyway, Martin Thibault did a talk on other sources of heirloom yeasts and profiled Bolivia (chicha), Bhutan, and Ethiopia. It was nice to have a short trip down memory lane, and I briefly was inspired to throw together a Fulbright proposal to study this. By the end it was clear that–duh–I don’t need to be the person to do this research, there’s probably a Bolivian researcher out there I could work to finance to do it. Obviously.
I reached out to an anthropologist friend who studied at the Universidad Mayor de San Simón in Cochabamba with the contours of this idea, and he essentially suggested a lit review. There’s apparently already a deep body of (mostly hard copy) literature out there on chicha, so I’m going to take a stab at reviewing it. I’m going to start with the low hanging fruit and look at the English language material available on Google Scholar. At the moment, I’m mostly interested in ingredients, methods/processes, and how it’s consumed at present.
Let’s start with this excellent 2019 article by Bassi, et al., Peruvian chicha: A Focus on the Microbial Populations of This Ancient Maize-Based Fermented Beverage. The authors sampled “27 chicha samples collected from 14 different ‘chicherias’ in seven provinces” and then analyze them using Next-Generation Sequencing, whatever that means (I’m decidedly not a microbiologist).
What really catches my eye, though, is Table 1:
Look at all that data! Nineteen out of 27 chicherias use “uncontrolled fermentation,” and one of them (Barranca) does both uncontrolled and controlled.Fermentation time ranges from 1 to 15 days, with most falling in the 2-4 day range. Every single one has some kind of additional ingredient beyond maize. Other ingredients include quinoa, fava beans, barley, wheat flour, sugar, chancaca, fruit, other varieties of maize, herbs, and spices. Talk about diversity!
It’s unclear whether uncontrolled necessarily means spontaneous, or if it might include cases where unfermented chicha wort is added to a vessel that’s already well-inoculated with resident microbial cultures. The authors note,
According to old practices, ceramic vessels called “tomin” are used to start the fermentation process. The specific porous material of these containers helps the adherence and colonization of microorganisms. During the fermentation, small maize debris deriving from maize grounding, are continuously drained, rubbed and crumbled to obtain the “borra” that can be used as inoculum of microorganisms for the next productions. In fact, the addition of “borra de chicha”, followed by a second fermentation step, allows higher alcoholic level of the beverage.
That section lacks a citation, but it seems like they’re drawing on tradition rather than a survey of the chicherias they sampled. Still, it would indicate resident cultures are contributing to the fermentation itself.
Finally, this study is entirely focused on the bacterial composition of these cultures. And while I’m really weak on microbiology, it’s worth noting they found lactobacillus in each of the cultures, and it was generally the dominant bacteria.
Anyway, it’s fascinating to just dip your toes in and right away see that chicha has a lot more diversity than I had initially expected.
Embracing Limitations 