Hello and welcome to Give Me Weird Drinks, a newsletter for exploring the world of beverages! Now quit horsing around and settle in for a story about milky, homemade booze.
June in Mongolia means the country’s vast grasslands are entering their verdant main act and all across the countryside newborn horses are racing around green pastures. Those foals are hungry, gulping down milk from their mothers as fast as they can. But they’re not the only ones eager for fresh mare milk.
In the gers, or yurts, that dot the countryside and shelter families living off the land, Mongolians are also eagerly awaiting the first foals of the season. They’re excited, not only for true signs of summer, but also to begin producing the country’s gold medal drink: airag.
Also called kumis or koumiss, airag has been called “the national drink of Mongolia.” It’s a fizzy, fermented concoction of mare milk, plus curated cultures of lactose-loving microorganisms.
To make the beverage, fresh, filtered mare’s milk is spiked with a starter culture and left at the entrance to a yurt, traditionally in a sack made from animal hide or in a wooden vat. Anyone entering or leaving the yurt is encouraged to give the sack or vat a few strong shakes or plunges to keep the microbes happy and well-fed and to keep the beverage from curdling.
A rider on the Mongolian grasslands (courtesy Pierre André Leclercq)
Happy microbes are key. They feed off the sugar (lactose is milk sugar and horse milk has more lactose in it than cow’s milk), converting milk into a mildly alcoholic drink, consumed in great gulps by thirsty Mongolians.
Weighing in at 2% alcohol, airag isn’t consumed so much for a buzz, as it is for hydration and nutrition. Besides being made from mare milk, airag can also be made from cow or yak milk (sometimes called tarag), according to Björn Reichhardt, a doctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History’s Dairy Cultures project. Camel milk can also be fermented into a drink called khormog.
The nutritional qualities of airag have kept Mongolians strong and scientists intrigued, chiefly because Mongolians are widely lactose intolerant and without the assistance of microbes, they would have a hard time chugging mare’s milk.
And chug they do.
“It’s a pretty standard drink,” said Dr. Michael Frachetti, an archaeology professor at Washington University in St. Louis who has spent several research seasons on the grasslands of Central Asia. On a hot day, working under the beating sun, herders will pound two or three cups during their midday meal, he said.
Airag, also called kumis, served and ready to drink (courtesy Indy Guide)
It’s served at truck stops and at marketplaces, in homes and under the open sky. Sometimes it’s cut with cold water to give it different slightly flavors or viscosity, but it always has a tangy flavor and a fizzy texture. Different regions have their own flavors, but Mongolians swear higher altitudes produce the best airag, he added.
As far as getting blasted on airag, forget about it says Dr. Frachetti. Airag is milky, plain and simple. “It’s not a gin and tonic,” he said. To get a buzz going it would be “like the equivalent of drinking seven White Russians or something.”
Mongolian airag is hard to track down outside of Central Asia. A Japanese beverage manufacturer created a derivative product, called CALPIS, that was reportedly inspired by a trip to Mongolia in the early 1900s. It’s sold in the U.S. under the name CALPICO (because there’s something unsettling about crushing some “calpis”).
While Mongolians might not recognize CALPIS as the real thing, with the right ingredients airag can be made at home. All it takes is horse milk and some starter culture. Sounds easy, right?
Not so fast, said Dr. Kirk French, an anthropology professor at Penn State University. He would know—one of his students’ assignments is to make real airag.
One of the first challenges is milking a horse. Mares are far more skittish than cows when it comes to milking and won’t release milk unless they can smell their foals and make skin-to-skin contact with them, he said. In Mongolia, techniques for keeping mares happy while being milked have been passed down from generation to generation. At Penn State, horse milking must be learned.
But as a land grant university, the school has an equine science program with around 60 Quarter Horses, a popular horse breed in North America. “The horse barns are right next to the stadium. I had students come over and milk horses to make airag,” he said.
A student attempts to milk a mare at Penn State University (courtesy Dr. Kirk French)
The animals’ caretakers initially thought the project was crazy, he said. “Horses in Mongolia are small and these ones are huge,” he explained. “Here they just milk to check on the health of the horse. They’ve never filled up jars of milk.”
Students were clamoring to try the milk. “Everyone wanted to try it. It’s super sweet,” he said. “Like cereal milk.”
A student tastes unfermented mare’s milk (courtesy Dr. Kirk French)
He eventually had the veterinarians milk the animals and collect enough milk to make a batch of airag.
In an early attempt to culture the mare’s milk, Dr. French let natural yeast colonize the liquid. It produced less than savory results.
In another batch, he used proven material: he brought back airag from a field trip to Mongolia, where he had observed airag and another weird drink, shimiin arkhi, being made. Dr. French’s Mongolian batch of airag, safely stored in a university freezer, provided cultures he needed to jumpstart the Penn State mare milk.
The class project was a success. “It tasted different, mainly because of the diet, but it worked,” he said. “It was pretty exciting.”
Dr. Kirk French (far left) with his 2018 class. Part of the coursework was to make airag from scratch (courtesy Dr. Kirk French)
Not only did his class get to understand the process of making a weird drink that’s thousands of years old (seriously, Genghis Khan loved it and scientists think it’s been around for 3,500 years or longer!), but the fragrance of the bubbling airag brought Dr. French back to the steppes. “It smells like Mongolia to me,” he said.
It also brought to mind a story rooted in patriotism and pride that he’d heard during his research.
It was 2008: Mongolia had never won a gold medal in all the years it had participated in the Olympic Games. The games, held in Beijing that year, were relatively nearby for Mongolians and they had shown up to cheer for their athletes. Excitement grew when it looked like judoka Tüvshinbayar Naidan might have a shot at the top of the podium.
The gold medal match saw Naidan face off against Kazakhstan’s Ashkat Zhitkeyev in the men’s half-heavyweight judo gold medal match. In a series of aggressive moves, Naidan was able to take the lead, eventually winning the country’s first gold medal.
It’s a story repeated from the capital of Mongolian, Ulaanbaatar, to the remote yurts Dr. French visited. The lesson is clear to Mongolians.
Why was Naidan able to best Zhitkeyev, hoisting Mongolia’s flag higher than it had ever risen before?
The short answer to that question, as anyone should know, is because he had been drinking airag since he was a baby.