What is rice wine?

To make "rice wine" at home, should I have raw glutinous rice or rice with its shells necessarily ?

• I only have rice,dried kernels ready for cooking & its not new.(its without husk.)

• Answer:

  Making rice wine or sake is a long and very involved process - not sure if it's possible for home production. I can't recall all the specifics, but the type of rice used matters significantly and the percentage of the husk milled off makes a big difference in quality. Essentially, there is a starchy core to a grain of rice and the higher proportion of that you have versus the husk, the higher the quality of the resulting alcohol. But fermenting the rice is the real problem. It's not sugary in the way that fruit is. The starches in the rice have to be converted into fermentable sugars, which requires a specific type of mold to grow, in a specific way. Your water source also makes a huge difference, but again, I'm not certain on the details. I'd recommend looking up Sake production for a better idea of how it's done. Suffice to say, rice that we might otherwise use for cooking isn't likely to produce wine worth drinking.