Handia

Handia (handi, hadiya) is a traditional fermented rice beer of the Adivasi (tribal) communities of the eastern Indian plateau — the Santhal, Munda, Ho, and Oraon of Jharkhand, Bihar, Odisha, West Bengal, and Chhattisgarh. Its fermentation depends on ranu (bakhar) — small tablets of powdered rice mixed with the powdered roots, barks, and leaves of roughly twenty local forest plants, which act as a starter culture carrying wild yeasts and amylolytic molds. The brew is made by cooking rice, cooling it on sal leaves, mixing in crushed ranu tablets, packing it into an earthen pot (the handi that gives the drink its name), and fermenting it for five to seven days. The knowledge is held and passed down by the women of each tribe, and the drink is central to Adivasi ritual and social life — served at Sarhul, Karma, Sohrai, and Baha festivals, at weddings and funerals, and at every community gathering, where it is a symbol of unity and hospitality. Each tribe uses a slightly different herbal mix in its ranu, giving regional variations in flavor and perceived medicinal property.

Cloudy, pale, mildly sweet-sour, and faintly earthy, with a low alcohol warmth and the herbal, forest-plant aroma of the ranu starter.

The fermentation is a two-stage starch-to-alcohol conversion carried out by the microbes in the ranu tablets. First, the amylolytic molds (Rhizopus, Aspergillus species carried on the herbal-rice tablets) secrete enzymes that break down the cooked rice's starch into fermentable sugars — the same saccharification step as in sake or other Asian rice brews; this matters because brewer's yeast alone cannot convert raw starch. Second, the wild yeasts in the same starter ferment those sugars into ethanol and carbon dioxide, producing the mild alcohol and the slight effervescence. The lactic-acid bacteria in the mix produce lactic acid, which gives the drink its clean sourness and, by lowering the pH, suppresses spoilage organisms — the reason this beer keeps for days in an earthen pot without refrigeration. The herbal components of the ranu contribute both flavor and, in Adivasi understanding, medicinal properties; the long, slow fermentation at ambient temperature gives a low-alcohol, probiotic-rich drink.