Judima is the traditional rice wine of the Dimasa (Dimasa Kachari) people of Northeast India, who live mainly in Dima Hasao and neighbouring districts of Assam and around Dimapur in Nagaland. Cooked rice is fermented with a starter cake called humao, and the sweet, yellowish liquid that collects is drawn off and diluted to drink. Each community in the region has its own rice beer and starter: the Karbi, for example, make hor alank with a starter called thap, and the Zeme Naga make zao (Yumnam et al., 2024). Judima is served to guests and at marriages, births and mourning, and is made and sold mostly by women (Sarmah et al., 2022).
The GI Tag
In September 2021 judima received a Geographical Indication (GI) tag, reported as the first for a beverage from Northeast India. Assam Agricultural University researched and documented it for the application, working with the Youth Association for Development and Empowerment (YADEM) of Dima Hasao (Morung Express, 2021), which also describes its distinctly sweet flavour.
Humao: The Starter Cake
A documentation study of Dimasa brewers describes how humao is made: the bark of Acacia pennata (thempra or thembra) is sun-dried and powdered, mixed with soaked, ground rice and a little water into a dough, and shaped into cakes of about 80–100 g. Each new cake is dusted with crumbs of an old one, which carries over its microbes, and the cakes are sun-dried for 4–5 days and keep for months. Other plants recorded as additions include Piper betle, Buddleja asiatica and Hedyotis scandens (Sarmah et al., 2022).
Humao itself hasn’t been analysed microbiologically, but related starter cakes from Assam have. In emao, the starter of the Bodo, moulds of the genus Rhizopus made up about two-thirds of the community (Narzary et al., 2021), and the starch-digesting moulds isolated from two other Assamese starters were Amylomyces rouxii and Rhizopus oryzae, neither of which produced mycotoxins (Das et al., 2017). The moulds turn the rice starch into sugar, and yeasts turn the sugar into alcohol. Finished rice beers from southern Assam contained bacteria such as Pediococcus, Lactobacillus, Bacillus, Leuconostoc and Acetobacter (Yumnam et al., 2024).
How Judima Is Made, and How Strong It Is
Rice – the Bairing or Bora varieties are preferred – is boiled, cooled on bamboo mats and mixed with crushed humao, about one cake for 5 kg of rice. The mixture goes into an earthen or bamboo vessel (khulu) covered with jute sacking. After 5–7 days, faster in summer, a slightly yellowish liquid appears; it’s collected, strained if needed and diluted for drinking. Many people prefer old, stored judima for its smoother, more blended flavour (Sarmah et al., 2022).
The same study measured a pH of about 4.7 in fresh judima and 4.9 in old judima, and about 20% alcohol by volume in the undiluted liquid, using a colorimetric method (Sarmah et al., 2022). That’s far stronger than a beer, which is why judima is diluted – and a reason to treat a home batch as strong drink.
Relatives
Judima belongs to the wide family of Asian rice wines made with mould-and-yeast starter cakes, alongside Vietnam’s rượu cần, the Philippines’ tapuy, Korean makgeolli and Chinese jiu niang. Eastern India’s tribal rice beer handia is brewed with herbal starter tablets. From neighbouring Manipur come fermented bamboo shoots, soibum.