Skip to main content
Support

Browse by category

All categories
Home

Alcoholic drinks from India

Madua (Arunachal finger-millet beer)

Madua is a finger-millet beer brewed by almost every tribe of Arunachal Pradesh. The millet is roasted for 30 minutes, cooked soft, mixed with a starter and fermented in a leaf-covered basket for 4 days in summer or 7 in winter; warm water dripped through the basket carries out the golden beer.

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

DocumentedAlcoholic drinks4 days – 7 days

Recipe

No fixed amounts recordedVillage process with no fixed amounts; the survey gives only times and the water flow.
Finger millet[SHRI2012]
Starter culture[SHRI2012]
Ektam leaves (wild banana, Phrynium)To cover the basket[SHRI2012]
Warm waterDripped through at about 1 L per hour to draw the beer[SHRI2012]

Total time across the recorded steps: 4 days – 7 days

Start
Drag the bar or press Play

What changes: The millet is roasted

Step 1 of 5
Roast the millet
Time
30 min
Reported
Temperature
Not documented
Salt
None given
Acidity
Not documented

Output: roasted millet.

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

Madua is a finger-millet beer brewed by almost every tribe of Arunachal Pradesh. The millet is roasted for 30 minutes, cooked soft, mixed with a starter and fermented in a leaf-covered basket for 4 days in summer or 7 in winter; warm water dripped through the basket carries out the golden beer. Made in 5 steps over 4 days – 7 days. The longest step, ferment, takes 4–7 days (Shrivastava K 2012).

Key numbers
Main step4–7 daysReported[SHRI2012]Ferment

What makes this one different

The millet for madua is roasted for 30 minutes before it is cooked, and the beer is washed out with warm water dripped through the basket at about 1 L an hour. The Monpa mingri, from the same survey, is instead filtered off with no water.

Related ferments

Safety

The survey reports that children, and even infants, are sometimes given traditional drinks at festivals. This records a custom and is not advice, because madua is an alcoholic drink. In its kombucha guidance, BCCDC says ethanol above 0.5 % can be a concern for toddlers and infants, and that no alcohol is recommended during pregnancy.

History and sources

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

Shrivastava et al. surveyed 21 tribes in 14 districts and found madua made and drunk by almost all tribes in all 14 districts; it was most liked by men of West Kameng district (73.4 %).

  1. [SHRI2012] Shrivastava K., Greeshma A.G., Srivastava B. "Biotechnology in tradition: a process technology of alcoholic beverages practiced by different tribes of Arunachal Pradesh, North East India." Indian J. Traditional Knowledge 11(1):81–89, 2012, text and flow chart 3 (read from a Wayback Machine copy of the PDF)paper
  2. [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 1 (madua, all tribes, finger millet)paper
  3. [bccdc] BC Centre for Disease Control, Environmental Health Services 2015 (updated 2020), Food safety assessment of kombucha tea recipe and food safety plan (kombucha, not madua)gov