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Alcoholic drinks from Indonesia, Malaysia, Brunei, Singapore

Tapai / tape ketan (fermented glutinous rice)

Glutinous rice is soaked, steamed, cooled and dusted with powdered ragi, a dry starter cake of moulds and yeasts. Wrapped in leaves or covered, it ferments for two or three days into a soft, sweet, slightly sour and alcoholic paste with its own juice.

Fully documentedAlcoholic drinks9.6 days – 14 days

Recipe

Amounts from a sourceAmounts for black tape ketan from an Indonesian process description; household tapai uses no fixed amounts.
Glutinous rice, white or black[darniadi2023][abubakar2026]
Ragi tape (dry starter cake), powdered0.27 % of the rice weightLevel given for black tape ketan; ragi is rice flour with moulds, yeasts and spices such as pepper, garlic and cinnamon[darniadi2023][delva2022]
Banana or rubber leaves, or a lidded plastic boxTo wrap or cover the rice while it ferments[abubakar2026]
Starterkoji/qu/mold-starter (ragi)

Total time across the recorded steps: 9.6 days – 14 days

Start
Drag the bar or press Play
Close-up: water moving into a grain

What changes: Water soaks into the glutinous rice grains

Step 1 of 5
Soak the glutinous rice
Time
12 h
Reported
Temperature
Not documented
Salt
None given
Acidity
Not documented
Which microbes the steps name, step by step
Rhizopus
Yeasts
Lactic acid bacteria
Mucor

Output: soaked rice.

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

Glutinous rice is soaked, steamed, cooled and dusted with powdered ragi, a dry starter cake of moulds and yeasts. Wrapped in leaves or covered, it ferments for two or three days into a soft, sweet, slightly sour and alcoholic paste with its own juice. Made in 5 steps over 9.6 days – 14 days. The longest step, keep cold, takes 7–10 days (Darniadi S. et al. 2023). Rhizopus (about 83 % of fungal reads in tape ketan) and Mucor and Amylomyces rouxii do most of the fermenting.

Key numbers
Main step7–10 daysReported[darniadi2023]Keep cold
Temperature98 °CReported[darniadi2023]Steam
AciditypH 4Reported[fao1999]Wrap or cover and ferment

What makes this one different

Tapai is eaten as a sweet paste, not pressed or strained into a drink. Mould and yeast work together on the steamed rice in two to three days, while rice wines go on for weeks.

Related ferments

Variants

  • Tape ketan hitamBlack glutinous rice; the product carries 25.7 mg of anthocyanins per 100 g.
  • Tape singkong / tapai ubi / peuyeumCassava instead of rice; peuyeum is a drier Sundanese form.
  • Tapai nasiWhite non-glutinous rice.

Made the tapai / tape ketan way

Other tapai / tape ketan kinds

Made the same way, each with what its own sources record.

Brem (Balinese rice wine; also brem cake)brem

Alcoholic drinks from Bali

Tape ketan is eaten as a sweet, soft rice. For brem the juice is pressed out of the tape mash and fermented again, for weeks to months, into a clear rice wine. In Java, brem also means a solid cake eaten as a snack.

Sources: Sujaya I.N.; Nazarudin H. 2013; Wikipedia; Wikipedia

Tuak (Borneo rice wine)tuak

Alcoholic drinks from Sarawak and Kalimantan

Tapai ketan is eaten as sweet, soft rice. Tuak is made from cooked glutinous rice, ragi, water and optional sugar, and is drunk as a sweet wine (Wikipedia, Tuak).

Starter
Ragi, a traditional starter base that contains bacterial enzymes and yeast (Wikipedia, Tuak)
Ingredients
Cooked glutinous rice, ragi, water and sugar, which is optional (Wikipedia, Tuak)

Sources: Wikipedia; Wikipedia; Wikipedia

Safety

Tapai contains alcohol, which rises to about 7 % in two to three days. Keep it in the fridge and eat it within about a week. The cassava version carries a cyanide risk the rice version does not. Food Standards Australia New Zealand says cassava must be peeled and fully cooked, and warns that boiling or steaming the roots removes only 10–75 % of the compounds that form cyanide and is not reliable on its own.

History and sources

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

The word tapai comes from Proto-Malayo-Polynesian *tapay, "fermented food", and the same root names the large earthen jars tapayan once used for the ferment. No dated first record of tapai ketan was found. In Malaysia the elders once kept taboos when making the dessert, such as keeping the glutinous rice away from oil and not chewing betel nut while wrapping it.

  1. [fsanz-cassava] Food Standards Australia New Zealand, Cassava and bamboo shootsgov
  2. [fao1999] FAO 1999, Fermented cereals, a global perspective (FAO Agricultural Services Bulletin 138), chapter 3, Asia-Pacificgov
  3. [darniadi2023] Darniadi S. et al. 2023, Impact of hydrocolloid and foaming agent on the physicochemical, microstructural and bioactive characteristics of foam-mat freeze-dried tapai (fermented black glutinous rice) powder, Food Sci Nutr 11:578–589, doi:10.1002/fsn3.3098paper
  4. [wicaksono2026] Wicaksono W.A., Zukancic E., Zlatnar M., Suwanto A., Berg G. 2026, Traditional fermented foods of Indonesia harbour functionally redundant but phylogenetically diverse taxa, FEMS Microbes 7:xtag005, doi:10.1093/femsmc/xtag005paper
  5. [abubakar2026] AbuBakar H. et al. 2026, Comparative effects of plastic, banana-leaf and rubber-leaf packaging on fermented glutinous rice (tapai), J Sci Food Agric, doi:10.1002/jsfa.71081paper
  6. [delva2022] Delva E., Arisuryanti T., Ilmi M. 2022, Genetic diversity of Amylomyces rouxii from ragi tapai in Java Island based on ribosomal regions ITS1/ITS2 and D1/D2, Mycobiology, doi:10.1080/12298093.2022.2028436paper
  7. [WP:Tapai] Wikipedia, Tapai (outline and variants only)wiki