Rakia Alcohol Content Judged By Bubble Watching

Image by outang via Flickr

Sometimes there are tricks that just astound you when witnesses. This particular trick was performed by a Bulgarian who had been making home rakia for over 50 years. He is a maestro of the art of rakia making. Whether from sliva grapes, apples, cherries, melon or other fruit bases he knows the art like the back of his hand.

Talking to this man about rakia is fascinating his home has a little private kazan in an outhouse along with a grape press for wine making. His land is full of sliva and apples tree and one decare of vines in perfect order. His stock of rakia goes back the 50 years he had been making it. 2 litres are held back each year rakis is made, there are only a few years he had missed out due to being abroad for a while.

i had brugh him a bottle of last year's rakia as a present and this was where the trick he had cam into play. He shook the bottle watched the bubbles rise and told me it was 42% proof! I thought this was a fluke at the time but foudn that is wasn't when he paid a return visit to my home a few weeks later.

I have three different years of rakia line up and asked him to tell me what proof these were by shaking the bottle and watching the rate of travel bubbles rose at. I knew the alcohol content of these rakias, 41%, 45% and 48% proof respectively. He took each bottle and went through the process. His answers were almost 100% correct he just got the last one wrong but was only 1% out! Amazing!

It is a simple case of knowing that the slower the bubbles rise the higher the alcohol content, but the skill is recognising and judging the speed against the alcohol content, this comes with 50 years practice.

Poor Wine? - Rakia A Safety Net

Image via Wikipedia

Rakia making is a safety net for poor wine made. Most grape growers turn out some lovely wine in Bulgaria, in fact better than most commercially bottle wine in my opinion. However on occasions there may be a bad year for grapes as it was in 2007.

There was a drought in the summer of this particular year and to add to this, the preceding winter was mild culminating in not just poor grapes, but a crop shortage that year. Ten of thousands of litres of wine was still made with the quality not as good as in previous years, sugar had to be added to make up for the lack of natural sugar in the grape.

This led to the drinking wine not being as full bodied as it should. This is where the safety net of rakia comes into play. Not only is rakia made from the sediment that was left over from the wine making, but now in this bad season of wine, more rakia is made from the first fermented wine that isn't as palatable as it normally is. The result is double the amount of rakia in this poor wine making season.

I myself didn't make any drinking wine that particular year, it was all rakia. The following year, which was last year turned out to be a great season for grapes and wine making and the equilibrium of wine and rakia production was reinstated.

In a nutshell, there is never a bad season for rakia making as less than perfect wine and other fruits are always going to make alcohol and that is all you need to make rakia. It still retains the flavour of the fruits that are used and can be stored in wood based storage containers to improve the flavour even more. Especially for the poor wine year such as 2007 as there is double the amount of rakia made as there is surplus stock to keep in storage.

The Cherry Rakia Making Season Soon

Before I start there is another decent website page on another site that gives a good account of rakia and it's attributes. There are also a couple of pictures alongside to illustrate within the articles. Worth a read although the presentation isn't brilliant, it's purely information based. It can be entered on this link below:

http://www.absoluteastronomy.com/topics/Rakia

It is true to say that there really isn't any other site that is totally dedicated to rakia other than commercial marketing sites. This is surprising as there are millions of people who drink and appreciate rakia or its equivalent worldwide.

More to come soon as the crop growing season starts, first off is the cherries that ripen first for a special cherry based rakia in Bulgaria from the Sliven region.

You will be taken through the process nearer the harvesting time in May to June. Early rakia for those who have run our of last year's supply already.

After the last post of the best rakia to date, I had an experience of one of the worse only last weekend, but I won't name its producer as he is a nice Bulgarian chap with his heart in the right place. A clue in in an article posted about an evening of rakia on Baba Marta Den Eve.