DIY Spirit Is the Only Thing Moving Indonesia's Alcohol Scene Forward

In the back corner, a gas stove burns continuously, heating a water-filled basin. Books detailing recipes and experiments are scattered on the work table, among other shabby books stacked against the shelf. For the past six years, Anais and her assistant Joko have been working their way around the kitchen, creating rice wine and palm wine.

The two are busy cooking up sticky rice flavored with pandan. Anais painstakingly mixed the rice and pandan while keeping an eye on the sugar mixture. The cooked rice is then mixed with sugar and yeast, then left to sit for a month, maybe longer, like a year.

“It’s important that all our tools stay sterile,” Anais says as she stirs the batch of rice. “The water needs to be clean too. And most importantly, you need to be focused. If you aren’t, the drink won’t turn out right.”

Mixing traditional alcoholic drinks is Anais’ response to the strict regulations on alcohol in Indonesia—since 2015, alcoholic beverages have been banned in convenience stores in many cities, including Yogyakarta. It was the cherry on top after Indonesia introduced a 300 percent liquor tax increase in 2010.

Anais, a former seamstress, took matters into her own hands. After chatting with a neighbor who had tried fermenting drinks as well, Anais began experimenting with rice, sweet potato, buckwheat, millet, and rosella plants.

She failed many times over before she finally perfected her recipe: For every 10 kilograms of rice, she uses 10 kilograms of sugar and 5 kilograms of yeast. Her first ever creation was makgeolli, an easy-to-make Korean style palm wine with 5 to 8 percent alcohol. Makgeolli only needs to ferment for 3-4 days—leave it for any longer and it becomes twice to thrice stronger.

“Fermenting drinks is like therapy for me,” says Anais, who says she's struggled with bipolar disorder for 10 years. “So I always have something to do. I don’t look at all of this from a business perspective. What’s important to me is that I make some money back, enough for me to eat.”

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In a single month, Anais produces up to 40 liters of various fermentations. And she doesn’t sell it to just anyone. She relies on two out-of-town distributors to sell her products. Sometimes, she'll set up shop at a local market or a concert.

“Sometimes we drink things without knowing what’s in them,” Anais says. “I want consumers to know what they’re drinking. They need that knowledge.”

In Yogyakarta, a myriad of fermented beverages are popping up on the market, made from oranges, passionfruit, and snake fruit. Aside from Anais’ creations, snake fruit “pondoh” fermentation is a popular one. Even though this is all distributed in an underground fashion, pondoh is hugely popular. It's the cheapest alcoholic beverage available, at Rp 60,000 to 65,000 ($4 USD) per liter. In this city, you'll find a bottle of pondoh in any refrigerator, or passing from hand to hand on the dance floor.

“Apart from being close to our production materials, the temperature here is comfortable and the groundwater is clean,” says explains Randu*, one of the owners, of this discreet location. There are no houses within a 100-meter radius, so the groundwater isn’t contaminated. “The yeast might die if the water isn’t clean."

Each season, Randu and his team need 100 kilograms of peeled snake fruit that make around 150 liters of product. Their raw materials are supplied by farmers around their makeshift factory. They’ve also employed women who live nearby to peel and halve the fruits before they’re processed. These freelancers help keep the business under the radar and away from the authorities.

“We try to help out the snake fruit farmers because there’s always overproduction, which makes the market price drop. When there’s an abundance, the women tell us to just grab whatever we can carry,” Randu says.

Even though the production is somewhat secretive, Randu believes it won’t invite any serious trouble. “We’re confident enough to take this business seriously because we know the process is totally safe. We’re not making any sort of shady liquor mixed with unsafe chemicals, our process is true fermentation,” Randu explains as he shows us the rooms where everything happens. Because they use regular yeast, they can guarantee that the alcohol content of Pondoh can never exceed 20 percent. “Ours is so much safer than those shady homemade liquors. You might get one with methanol in it, and that’ll kill you.”

The fermentation process for pondoh takes at least three months. Because they have a set cycle, now they can harvest twice a week. In addition to regular pondoh and premium pondoh, they also produce a liquor they call Moonshine Pondoh, which goes through a more rigid distillation process and can contain up to 40 percent alcohol. The tools they use vary, ranging from a distiller from Russia to a washing machine to filter the snake fruit pulp during production. Why? Because an actual filtering machine is more expensive, he says.

According to these moonshine connoisseurs, the do-it-yourself and "work with what you’ve got" culture is what gave rise to the many variants of fermented drinks available in Yogyakarta. Randu’s own experiments draw advice from YouTube, various texts, and friends.

We chat as we sip on the popular drink. “The challenge of selling this drink is not drinking your own supply, or else we won’t make any money,” Randu says. Even though he manages to make around Rp 20 to 30 million ($1,430 to $2,140 USD) a month, Randu and his team can’t say the Pondoh business is a very profitable one.

“If we make a profit we can survive and keep making more pondoh, which is good," he says. "We’re an underground operation anyway, we’re illegal, so we can’t really expand."

Aside from the DIY culture that allows the fermentation business to thrive, pondoh production makes use of tight and dynamic networks of friends in the art community. “We get our support from a collective spirit; I think if our stuff was factory-made with a huge budget, the public support would be different.”

Despite the support they get, people like Randu are always on their guard because Indonesian authorities could knock on their makeshift factory at any time. Indonesia's regulations on the control and supervision of alcoholic beverages is generally pretty loose, but the enforcement is especially strict in a regional level, in cities like Yogyakarta, where a new problem arises. Since alcohol sales are completely banned, people tend to turn to bootleg alcohol that are unsafe. Just in the span of three years alone, from 2013 to 2016, 487 people died from alcohol poisoning in Indonesia. That's a 226 percent jump in deaths from alcohol poisoning compared to data from 2008 to 2012.

This is where traditional alcohol comes in. You won't find it at a mini market, but the production of traditional alcoholic drinks allowed within limitations, and some cities are taking advantage of that. Some of the popular drinks are Bekonang from Solo, Arak from Bali, and Cap Tikus from Manado.

“I think it’s more difficult to fully legalize fermented drinks in Muslim-majority areas,” Randu says.

But Randu and several Yogyakarta’s fermented drink producers have a burning desire to start a campaign that positively promotes alcoholic drinks. Afterall, drinking culture has always existed in Indonesia, which is influenced by the surplus of agricultural production. “It’s a bit utopian if you want to ban people from drinking liquor. Drinking culture is a part of our ancestral tradition," he says.

If someday Randu and his crew manages to convince the Yogyakarta government to legalize fermented drinks like pondoh, it may just be the city's new traditional souvenir. But he has a long way to go.

“It’s such a shame that people are very black and white when it comes to alcohol,” Randu concludes. By the time we wrap up our conversation, the bottle of pondoh we're sharing is half gone.

*Names have been changed for privacy.

This article was originally published on VICE Indonesia.