Chang (also chhaang, chhang) is the home-brewed grain beer of Tibet and the Tibetan-speaking Himalaya – Ladakh, Sikkim, Bhutan and the mountain regions of Nepal. In Tibet it’s made from highland barley (qingke, a hulless barley); lower down, rice and millet are common. Cooked grain is mixed with a dried starter of molds and yeasts, fermented for a few days, then soaked in water and strained into a cloudy, sweet-sour, lightly alcoholic drink. There are no hops and no boiled wort, so it tastes nothing like a lager.
An Everyday Drink, Not Only a Festive One
Chang is served at celebrations such as Losar, the Tibetan New Year, but it’s also part of ordinary eating. In a 2021 survey of 552 adults in farming counties along the Yarlung Tsangpo river in Tibet, one of four dietary patterns – most common among younger urban women – was built around tsampa (roasted barley flour), sweet tea and homemade barley chang (Zhou et al., 2021).
How Grain Becomes Chang
Barley starch can’t be fermented by yeast directly. In European beer, malting the grain solves that; in chang, molds in the starter do the job. Researchers who followed a traditional Tibetan highland barley wine through fermentation found the molds Rhizopus and the yeast Saccharomyces dominant from start to finish. Bacteria were diverse at first, but after 48 hours only a few genera remained – mainly Acetobacter (75%) and Leuconostoc (14%) – and they were tied to the drink’s main flavor compounds (Guo et al., 2020).
The starter is called phab in Tibetan and Bhutanese areas and marcha in Nepal and Sikkim: small dried balls of rice or other grain flour with herbs, seeded from an older batch. Yeasts isolated from Sikkim marcha included starch-digesting Saccharomycopsis fibuligera alongside alcohol producers such as Saccharomyces bayanus and Pichia anomala (Tsuyoshi et al., 2005); 35 starters from across the Eastern Himalayas held 105–108 bacteria per gram, mostly lactic acid bacteria (Pradhan & Tamang, 2019). It’s the same idea as the bubod used for Philippine tapuy or the ragi for Indonesian tapai.
How Strong Is Chang?
It varies with the grain, the starter, the fermentation time and how much water is added – and we found no published measurement of Tibetan barley chang we could verify. The closest measured relative, fermented finger millet from Darjeeling and Sikkim (kodo ko jaanr, the base of tongba), had a pH of 4.1 and 4.8% alcohol (Thapa & Tamang, 2004); the liquid you drink is weaker once water is added. Expect roughly beer strength, rising the longer the grain ferments before you add water.
Chang, Tongba and Other Grain Beers
In eastern Nepal, Sikkim and Darjeeling, fermented millet is packed into a tall vessel, topped with hot water and sipped through a bamboo straw – that’s tongba. Chang is usually strained and poured instead, served cool or warm. Other unhopped grain beers made the same “whole grain, wild starter, short ferment” way include Korean makgeolli, South African sorghum umqombothi and Peruvian chicha de jora. The region’s dairy staple chhurpi is made from the buttermilk left after churning butter.
Chang and Health
Chang is an alcoholic drink, and its live microbes don’t change that. In a Nepali hospital study of 1,500 patients with alcohol abuse or dependence, most drank homemade alcohol, and drinking tongba – chang’s millet cousin – was associated with about three times the odds of chronic liver disease, even after adjusting for the total amount of alcohol consumed (Pradhan et al., 2015). Enjoy it occasionally, and not during pregnancy, for children, or if you avoid alcohol.