Baijiu

en.wikipedia.org

21 points·peter_d_sherman··8 comments

>also known as shaojiu

As I understand it, Soju in Korea and Shochu in Japan both derive from this historically, and in turn shaojiu derives from simple grain distillation that came from Mesopotamia.

Baiju is a great love of mine. I've gone through countless bottles of it while in China and in the famous Chinese Mai tai a la LiPo Lounge in SF.

Lived in China for a while. Us (admittedly, extremely white) American ex-pats had a very fratty attitude toward "the baij."

Maybe it's because we could only afford the cheap stuff — but any baijiu we got our hands on was really, really nasty. Only palatable with a 1:25 Sprite solution.

My roommate brought some of this stuff back with him when he went out to China a year ago. He told me it gave him the most terrifying nightmares ever, so I've kept it on my shelf and avoided it so far.

I've tasted expensive Baijiu. It's also pretty nasty, possibly even moreso to my taste than the cheap stuff. I think it's one of those machismo things where everyone pretends they like something that is objectively terrible to prove their manhood, or something. Comparable to ultra-bitter IPAs in the west.

Chuhais for everyone!

Why is this on hacker news, lol.

There was a reference to this from a post earlier today https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21742485

"Baijiu is the world’s most popular spirit, with 10bn litres sold each year, almost entirely in China. The second most popular spirit in the world is vodka, with just 5bn litres sold."

I think this comes as quite a surprise to many people in the west.

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