Chicha de Yamor

This is the recipe and procedure, as near as I can gather, from a Discovery Channel show that visited the Maize Festival in Ecuador. The Festival celebrates the first corn harvest of the season, and chicha is an important part of the Festival. Many details were left out of the process, and so much of this, particularly regarding procedure, is conjecture on my part.

Ingredients

• "Five different kinds of corn". This looked to me like:
• Yellow
• Chulpe (orange)
• Morocho (pale yellow)
• White
• Jora

All but the jora were unmalted and still on the cob. It looked to me like jora made up 50-75% of the bill.

I don't know if this one was spiced or not. Of note was the fermentation in a wood barrel which appeared to be about 1/2bbl in size. The result was pale and murky yellow in color.

Procedure

• All (most?) of the unmalted maize was lightly toasted in a large metal pan over an open fire.
• All maize/jora was ground to meal with a Corona mill.
• The meal was added to a large metal pot "full of hot water" (I wish I knew exactly what "hot" meant) heated by a wood fire.
• Boil.
• Presumably, the chicha was then cooled (though not necessarily, see below) and strained into the fermenter, which was a wooden barrel.
• The method of innoculation is not clear, though it was probably through yeast and bacteria that have taken up residence in the wood of the barrel and/or the strainer (which was not shown).

It was mentioned that the process takes six hours. I suspect that this included cooling time. However, this may not be the case, and the boiling or near-boiling liquid may have been added directly to the barrel. This might have the effect of killing many undesirable things such as molds, but stopping short of decimating the populations of desirable things such as yeasts. Or, it is possible that the very hot chicha is allowed to cool in the barrel, thus sanitizing it, and the chicha is innoculated in some other way once cool (dregs from a previous batch, exposure to the air, a cane sieve, a wooden stick used for stirring, etc.) Sadly, these details were missing...

The chicha was served from a small communal bowl at a party. The lady whose chicha it was walked from table to table, offering a small amount to each person in turn until it was gone. This was said to encourage socialization/interaction and to foster a sense of equality.