Cheers! Welcome to the Nepalese village where everybody knows how to distill

Imagine a place where every home has paraphernalia for distilling spirits, where there is a toast for nearly any occasion, and where your taxes – paid in grain, not cash – are deposited straight into a communal still. Welcome to Nubri. A valley in northern Nepal, Nubri is home to roughly 3,000 Tibetan Buddhist highlanders. Over the course of three decades, I have spent a lot of time in Nubri studying the interplay of demographic trends and social change. Often that has been in the company of an ethnomusicologist colleague, Mason Brown, who studies local musical traditions. While conducting research, we both became aficionados of the local intoxicants chang and arak, and we were taught how to brew and distill them by Nubri resident and research collaborator Jhangchuk Sangmo Thakuri. Other scholars of Tibetan and Himalayan societies have commented on the importance of chang for ritual purposes and as a social lubricant. In Nubri, which is predominantly ethnic Tibetan, we learned firsthand the integral role both drinks had in maintaining local rituals, the economy and developing social relationships. The basics of brewing Let’s start with the basics. Chang is a fermented, noncarbonated beverage made from corn, barley or rice. A…

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