It’s a frigid winter afternoon, but inside a small event space in Manhattan’s Chinatown, about two dozen attendees in their 20s and 30s are feeling a warm flush. They’re drinking flights of Qinghong, a regional style of rice wine found primarily in Fuzhou, the capital city of Fujian province on China’s southeastern coast.

Each tasting cup features the rosy-colored, sweet-tart wine with berry and citrus notes. These batches of Qinghong were brewed and aged for 30, 45, or 60 days, and infused with jasmine or rose, all from scratch by Qixin Zhang and Shuyu Fang. The two friends have branded themselves the Fuzhou Sisters in a quest to explore their cultural heritage. Home-brewing Qinghong, and sharing it through community events and workshops, has has been their main focus the last couple of years.  

An attendee at the tasting event mentions that Qinghong is something their grandparents frequently sipped at mealtimes. But younger folks? Not so much. 

“When you’re younger, you don’t appreciate that kind of funky flavor, so I didn’t like it growing up,” says Fang. But that all changed during one Lunar New Year dinner when she was 22, about to move to the U.S. Fang tried a batch of Qinghong made by her dad’s friend. It was vibrant red, with a distinctly sour, honey-sweet flavor.

A few years after getting drunk with her dad on that bottle back in Fuzhou, Fang reconnected with her childhood friend, Zhang, who was also in New York City. They began to make Qinghong in their Brooklyn apartments and shared the process on social media. 

The Fuzhou Sisters plan to bottle their Qinghong and sell it to restaurants in the future. 

“The canvas is really large for us,” says Zhang. “There’s a lot of experimentation to make Qinghong in a lot of different ways.” 

Generational shift: A fresh, new style of Qinghong

A tart and punchy style of Qinghong has been gaining fans around New York City in recent years, thanks to brewers like the Fuzhou Sisters and Allen Cao, founder of Yaba rice wines and a co-founder of Fuzhou America. It’s a departure from longer-aged styles of Qinghong preferred by older generations. In America, sour, lactic flavors are appreciated in everything from beers to bubbly wines to kombucha. 

This variation of Qinghong, with its bright magenta hues, also grabs attention.“People sometimes think there’s berries or juice in it, so that’s a question we get a lot, and we tell them, it’s only rice,” says Zhang.

What is Qinghong

Unlike beer or baijiu, Qinghong is commonly brewed at home rather than bought in a store. It’s made with glutinous rice grains that are inoculated with a starter, or koji, called red yeast rice, which imparts a deep crimson color. 

Red yeast rice is a common culinary and medicinal ingredient in China, and is known to help lower cholesterol and blood pressure (you can often find it in supplement form throughout the Western world). In Fuzhounese cuisine, Qinghong is used to flavor foods, such as marinades and stews. Its lees (the spent yeasts), a byproduct of wine brewing, are also used in cooking to color foods, imparting a signature reddish tint to Char Siu-style dishes. Additionally, it’s used in postpartum cooking, as it’s known for improving blood flow.   

The future of Qinghong

Cao is eager to see Qinghong used in unconventional ways, such as in a cocktail mixed with peanut-butter–washed tequila at Brooklyn restaurant Nin Hao. Or using Qinghong’s lees to make a vibrant cherry Qinghong froyo.  

According to Cao, most of his Fuzhounese elders would prefer a Qinghong aged two or three years. “If it’s too young, most people are like, ‘It’s not ready yet,’” he says.  

But a shorter aging is exactly what gives his brand of Qinghong its zippy taste and bold complexion. Cao has spent the last several months traveling around China, learning the craft of Qinghong, and sharing his knowledge with others. There, he says, there’s a longstanding understanding of a “right” flavor profile etched into palates. It’s also enjoyed somewhat differently by folks in China: his grandfather, for instance, would only drink it hot with dinner. It brings out the aroma, like drinking hot sake, says Cao. 

“Although my grandpa mostly drank non-aged Qinghong because he didn’t have the patience to age it,” he adds. 

Before these Fuzhounese American home brewers, Qinghong could be hard to come by in the U.S. It might pop up as a stealth BYO bottle passed beneath tables at Fujianese restaurants in Chinatowns. Even though Fujianese Americans have come to represent one of the largest factions of Chinese Americans in the country over the last several decades, with many of them working in the restaurant industry, much of their culinary contributions have yet to be fully seen outside of their own communities. And when they have been, it hasn’t always been in a very positive way — like a 2011 report in The New York Times referring to the bootleg bottles as an “illegal wine.”  

“There’s something interesting and special happening in New York right now [with rice wine],” says writer Jess Eng, who is working on a cookbook with Cao about Fujianese cuisine. 

She points to classes about sake and rice fermentation, and the Korean rice wine brewery Hana Makgeolli in Brooklyn. 

“Having written about a lot of wines from a lot of cultures, I realize there isn’t much education about Qinghong, so I’m excited,” says Eng. 

At Nin Hao, owner Evan Toretto Li is looking forward to using Qinghong in a braised whole fish dish for a special Lunar New Year menu soon. Li credits his Qinghong-brewing mother for inspiring many of the dishes that appear on the menu, albeit often totally reconfigured for a new audience who appreciate creativity within tradition. 

“Red means good health and abundance,” says Li. In the hands of a new generation, Qinghong’s deep red now carries both inherited meaning and a color of renewal.