How Feni is made? The best alcoholic drink of Goa

The process of making Feni from Cashew

The Summers are an amazing time to get your hands on the traditional signature alcoholic beverage of Goa - FENI. Have a glass of Feni on the beach on a windy day and you will feel the world spinning, literally. It is stupefying and lethal. Hence, it is taken with a slice of green chilli and a wedge of lime dunked in the glass.

There are other alternatives to it as well. Urak is the unfiltered version of Feni and makes up about half the percentage of alcohol content than Feni. They are almost similar in taste, but only a regular drinker can distinguish among the two.

To help you better understand the brewery process, let me start it from the very beginning; it's source - cashews or toddy.
Talking about cashew Feni, what they apparently do is initially pluck buckets of cashews from their plantation farms. Then, the seeds are separeted from the fruit. After that, the cashew fruits are thrown into a tub to be crushed, either manually or with the aid of a crushing machine.

Cashrws pressed to extract the juice

Some say the best juice comes out initially and later on, it gets mixed with the sap, while some others beg to differ. They state that the sap gets completely removed from the cashew fruits within the first few juice extraction and usually the last round is free from sap.

Most of the harvesters are generous to give you the cashew juice - called NIRO in Konkani for

Collecting Niro from tub

 free (I had like 3 visits to one place recently, and got 4 litres of cashew juice to sip on during the summer time). All you have to do is refrigerate it and have a glass maybe whenever you're craving for a drink. It is highly rejuvenating. I bet you never tried cashew juice. It has that different taste.

Yeah, so the cashews are crushed, either manually with the help of a big stone, on which a person stands to apply additional weight and grind the cashews completely as shown in the picture. The loose cashew pulp, once juiced, is tied with the help of ropes in the form of a lump and the boulder is placed on the top again and the juice taken out.

The rest of the Niro is then poured in grounded earthen pots to ferment over a period of 7 days. The juice lets out an invigorating aroma once it ferments. This is then transferred to a large earthen pot on a fireplace, where the traditionally fermented juice gets vaporised to transform into Urak.

 Feni is basically double distilled, meaning the extracted Urak is poured again into the pot and reheated to get a more stronger alcohol, that has high medicinal properties.

It is a beautiful sight to see the extraction, fermentation, and filtering from Urak to Feni in a large earthen pot. It is said that the vapour is so volatile that sometimes, in the process of making Feni, the vapour suddenly ignites from reaching its flash point and reduces the whole 4-5 hour process to bits.

The other varieties are also brewed in a similar fashion involving traditional methods and natural processes. The people of Goa are usually not fond of adulteration and prefer the absolute product.

Though Feni is usually had with Sprite or any other alternative lemon drink, there are other cocktail versions of it. Some have Feni with limca as well. A word of caution while having Feni with such soft drinks is that you find it very tasty and smooth until it hits you. So, unless you want to get inebriated and pass out, kindly have it in small sips. It contains about 40% alcohol content for a reason.

Lastly, Feni bottles are usually priced around 250-300 rupees. Watch out for retailers selling adulterated Liquor. You will also remember the taste of Feni.

TIP: Prefer to have the Feni from a local bar, rather than the wholesale bottle. you get a much better kick from it. But, do research before you choose your spot for purchase. You will only get the best Feni liquor from the more remote villages in Goa, since they still follow the local tradition of distillation.