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Alcoholic drinks from Bhutan

Ara (Bhutanese grain spirit)ཨ་རག་

Ara is Bhutan's home-made grain spirit. Cooked maize, barley, wheat, rice or millet is cooled on a bamboo mat, sprinkled with a dry starter cake such as phab, left to ferment wrapped in blankets and then distilled. Some ara is drunk only fermented.

A short entry: the sources we found record only what is said here about Ara itself.

Short entryAlcoholic drinks

Recipe

No fixed amounts recordedWhat goes in. No source gives amounts for this ferment.
maize (east)
wheat and barley (central)
rice and barley (west)
finger millet
Starterphab (pho), a dark brown, flat starter cake of powdered maize, dried on paddy straw
Start
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What changes: Powdered maize is pressed into flat cakes and dried on paddy straw

Step 1 of 5
Make the phab starter
Time
Not documented
Temperature
Not documented
Salt
None given
Acidity
Not documented

Output: dry phab cakes.

Flavour
Not documented
Texture
Not documented
Colour
Not documented

Microbes at work in this step

Not documented for this step.

Method

Measured measured in a studySet fixed by a specification or tested recipeReported one source reports itTypical a general value, not sourced for this fermentUnconfirmed not yet checked against a source

At a glance

Ara is Bhutan's home-made grain spirit. Cooked maize, barley, wheat, rice or millet is cooled on a bamboo mat, sprinkled with a dry starter cake such as phab, left to ferment wrapped in blankets and then distilled. Some ara is drunk only fermented.

What makes this one different

Ara is a household spirit distilled from many grains, with maize most common in the east. Its phab starter is made from maize, where most Eastern Himalayan starters use rice.

Related ferments

Variants

  • Ara with butter and eggServed hot with butter and egg.
  • Ara/arak of Kinnaur (Himachal Pradesh)Made from apple, barley or pear with phab starter.

Safety

Distillation concentrates methanol as well as ethanol.

History and sources

Every number is labelled with how it is known. How this atlas is made

Offered on auspicious days in eastern Bhutan. Home production is legal in Bhutan only for private use.

  1. [WP:Ara (drink)] Wikipedia, Ara (drink) (outline only)wiki
  2. [s2] UVA Mandala, 'Ara making' (could not be fetched in 2026-10; its process outline was seen only in search summaries)web
  3. [RAWAT2021] Rawat J.M., Pandey S., Debbarma P., Rawat B. "Preparation of alcoholic beverages by tribal communities in the Indian Himalayan Region: a review on traditional and ethnic consideration." Front. Sustain. Food Syst. 5:672411, 2021, Table 1paper
  4. [pradhan2019] Pradhan P., Tamang J.P. 2019, Phenotypic and genotypic identification of bacteria isolated from traditionally prepared dry starters of the Eastern Himalayas, Frontiers in Microbiology 10:2526paper