Genghis Brew

Since the seventh grade or so I've harbored a strange crush on Genghis Khan. I vacillate between wanting to meet him and wanting to be him, and he's probably the closest thing to a historical role model that I have. Now, while most major figures of world history have been decently treated by the film industry, old Temujin hasn't been given anything close to his due.

Laughable efforts like the floptastic flick in which Omar Sharif starred or the flinchworthy performance of John Wayne (yes, the Duke as Genghis Khan) are as close as most American audiences get to a positive cinematic depiction of the life and times of the Khan. Other efforts depict Mongols rather universally as a kind of medieval Yellow Peril bent on spreading the plague and devouring the unbaptized babies of Christendom. Eastern audiences tend to fare better, it seems, as the Japanese, the Chinese, and the Mongolians themselves have fielded above average depictions.

Until recently, I had lamented the extreme unlikelihood of our ever seeing a decent Genghis Khan movie in the States. My hopes were somewhat resurrected when my Brother in Metal John and his wife Heather gave me a copy of Conn Iggulden's Genghis: Birth of an Empire a year or so ago. Then, more recently I was made aware of the impending release of Sergei Bodrov's epic film Mongol. Needless to say, Ryan and I went to see Mongol the weekend it opened in Austin.

Before we set out, however, we checked up on the reviews just to see what the local critics had to say about Bodrov's effort. The Austin Chronicle's review was particularly asinine, and was marred by several gross demonstrations of ignorance (attributing the Mongols geographically to Kazakhstan, for instance). I took this as a sign of hope. Many films such as The Chronicles of Riddick and 10,000 B.C. have received a liberal drubbing at the hands of the critics but turned out to be favorites of mine.

Thankfully, my predictions turned out to be true: Mongol is every bit of the barbaric masterpiece Ryan and I were anticipating. The giddy nerd-joy I experienced in seeing the drama of Temujin's early life played out by actors speaking Mongolian against an actual central Asian backdrop is difficult to describe. While I am not sure what most of the H2-driving, burb-dwelling attendees had actually come for other than to say that they'd seen an artsy foreign film complete with subtitles and everything, Ryan and I left ready to split the skulls of our enemies and ride off into the grassy sunset.

But since we couldn't exactly pull the scimitars out of the back of the car and go on a rampage, we decided to come home and get our geek on instead.

No, not like that.

A conversation arose during the drive back that centered around Mongol food and drink -- alcohol in particular. Of special interest was the drink known as airag, also called koumiss in other parts of the world. It is an alcoholic beverage made from fermented mare's milk, and it was and still is a staple of nomadic steppe life.

While neither Ryan nor I had ever had airag, we knew it could easily be made, and the germ of an experiment was born. We hit the internet up for recipes and the advice of brew-types around the world and found enough information to make a start of things.

The first thing to address was the issue of the primary component and production method. Traditionally, airag is made from mare's milk fermented in skin bags. Now, as we had neither available to us, we decided to substitute whole cow's milk for the mare's milk as it came closest to the lactose and fat content of the traditional base.

An apparent fluke of late 19th century medicine revealed a suitable replacement for the hide bags. It seems that during the late 1800s and early 1900s the supposed curative properties of koumiss were proclaimed far and wide. Resorts offering the "koumiss cure" sprang up, and those afflicted with various respiratory ailments went there to swill koumiss and, ostensibly, recover. While the cure itself seems to have been ineffectual, it left behind a variety of turn-of-the-century recipes for fashioning koumiss easily and expeditiously from cow's milk.

After surveying a variety of these recipes and other relevant articles on the internet, Ryan and I constructed our own plan of attack which we believed to be most likely to succeed. Our list of ingredients was as follows:

0.5 Gallons whole organic cow's milk
3 tablespoons table sugar
2 tablespoons lukewarm water
1.5 teaspoons Fleischmann's baking yeast
1 large saucepan
1 mixing bowl
1 funnel
4 sixteen-ounce EZ-Cap beer bottles

Of our ingredients the following should be noted. Brew-types will observe that we chose to use baker's yeast and not the typical brewer's yeast used in beer, wine, and mead production. Based on our reading, we discovered that the sugars present in milk are not metabolized by brewer's yeast, though for some reason baker's yeast does the trick. Authentic airag/koumiss is made from a starter culture containing a variety of active bacteria, but apparently 19th-century koumiss cure resorts faced, just as we did, a lack of this culture and derived a substitute.

The recipes and articles also warned would-be brewers of koumiss that the beverage self-carbonates during fermentation, and so advised the use of wine bottles with wired champagne corks or "patent-top" beer bottles, which to our best knowledge are synonymous with Grolsch-type swing-top bottles such as the ones sold by the EZ-Cap company. (Bottling in regular bottles will result in the explosion of the same.)

The first order of business was to allow the milk to warm up to room temperature. We did this in order to encourage the growth of the yeast and to simulate the lack of refrigeration experienced in ancient times. While the milk was warming, we sterilized our bottles and kitchen implements and allowed them to dry.

Once all was in readiness, we poured the milk into the saucepan and set it to warming on low heat, as the recipes we consulted required that the milk be lukewarm. Here you see the process underway. We stirred the milk regularly to prevent scorching.

The heating process lasted about a half an hour. The old recipes gave no indication of what they meant by "lukewarm" in terms of precise temperatures, so we employed the traditional (and somewhat less than sanitary) method of stick-your-finger-in-and-see-if-it's-hot-yet.

At this time we combined the sugar, water, and yeast, which was stirred into the warm milk once it finally passed the finger test. Here Ryan adds the mixture to the milk. Though it still looks a little grainy in the bowl, the yeast compound readily dissolved once it hit the milk. All the same, we gave it a few more stirs for good measure before we started bottling.

As for bottling, we realized belatedly that we should have chosen perhaps a smaller pan or employed some kind of siphon-pump. The pan we did use, as you can see, was rather full and therefore unwieldy. Still, we were smart enough to put the bottles in the sink and fill them there.

Here we see the unfortunate effects of our poor planning on the bottling process. The milk-yeast mixture spilled out around the sides of the saucepan and generally made an unholy mess of things, but we lost very little in the end.

The recipes we used called for the bottles to be filled only to the base of the neck in order to allow for foaming and for gas production during fermentation. As a result we had a tiny bit left over that we sacrificed to the steppe gods, but in larger batches it might amount to an extra bottle or so.

Once the bottles were capped, we shook them vigorously for 1-2 minutes each. This, according to our sources, stimulated the yeast and also replicated the stirring and jostling the mixture would have received hanging in a skin bag or from a saddle on the steppe. Afterward, we placed the bottles in a cool, dark corner of the living room and covered them with a towel (insurance against bottle explosion). There they remained for 12 hours, at which point the old recipes directed us to "chill and serve."

Because it was well into the wee hours of the morning when the time arrived, we stashed the bottles in the refrigerator instead, finally cracking one of them about a day later.

As neither of us had any experience with fermented milk beverages, Ryan and I were both concerned that the experiment might come out as a complete disaster. However, when we cracked the seal on our trial bottle, we were greeted by a loud pop and a stream of smoking carbonation. The koumiss foamed a great deal when poured off into a glass, and was beneath the bubbly white head a pale ivory color.

The taste was rather unique, and the closest I can come to describing it is a mixture of light beer and half-and-half. As for alcohol content, I suspect it is around 3% or less. It was indeed self-carbonated and very rich in texture, and thus far has produced none of the ill effects that I, a rather lactose-intolerant individual, experience when drinking dairy products. My best guess is that the fermentation process has broken down or otherwise neutralized the lactose in the milk to a large degree, thus making it safe for me to drink.

This would make a great deal of sense, as mare's milk is apparently much higher in lactose than cow's milk. It is lauded in older sources as a laxative when unfermented, but according to the same seems to have none of these qualities when converted into koumiss.

All in all, I am pleased with our experiment and look forward to perfecting the process. If it happens that I can actually consume this brew without exploding into gastrointestinal woe, then I will be inclined to keep more of it around. If nothing else, the whole ordeal has allowed me to experience one more thing to do with my favorite barbarian -- even if I'm sure they still do it way better in Mongolia.