http://www.deccanherald.com/deccanherald/may102005/spectrum83021200559.asp
Knock a Salud to the magical moonshine! DECCAN HERALD MARIANNE de NAZARETH goes to Goa and discovers the 400 year-old fenny which is being brewed by the SVD seminarians. Just cross over into Goa from Karwar over the ghats and the hills and vales of the area are aromatic with the heady smell of ripening cashew apples. This is the time when the small country stills are busy distilling arrack and fenny from the neera of the crushed cashew apples. In fact, the medicinal properties of fenny is something any self respecting Goan has grown up on. Flambed fenny was always taken with a dash of sugar to sort out a cold. That is why it is important for all Fenny lovers and visitors to Goa in April and early May to make a visit at least once to the SVD Seminary in Raia near Margoa to have a sip of the home grown fenny distilled by Father Caetano and his helpers. The SVD Seminary fenny is virtually unknown and will be the mecca of those who long for the true blue pure fenny. The little cottage industry brews the purest form of the popular drink. Walking around with Father Caetano one is amazed by his entrepreneurship. �The cashew tree is native to Goa and Karwar and grows profusely all over the hills. �I have supplemented the acreage by growing more trees every year and looking after the existing ones,� he reveals. �We do not sell our fenny, but visitors like you are given a drink for free when they come here,� he explains. Cashew apple As he speaks, a large open bodied truck backs up to an open shed, where it disgorges its large barrels of the fresh and ripe fruit. Pickers have hand picked the fruit off the hundreds of trees on the hill sides. Very like the monks in Europe who are famed for the champagne and brandy that they brew, Father Caetano is famous for his full bodied fenny. Sitting among mounds of apples, young boys from the orphanage on a holiday, pick off the cashew seed and deposit the apple in a big pile of red, orange and yellow fruit. The fruit is then taken in a big bucket and put into the shredder, which shreds the fruit untouched by hand. The shredded fruit is again taken by barrels and put into very modern looking crushers, where the lid is screwed down, squeezing the juice out of the fruit into buckets below. This juice is topped up into huge barrels and left to ferment in the sun for a couple of days. It is interesting to literally hear the bubble and pop of the fermenting juice and the already pungent smell of the fenny filling the air around these barrels. Traditionally, no fermenting agent is used and the juice ferments by itself. The first distillation produces arrack and the second distillation produces the famous cashew fenny. Later, this juice is poured into huge vats and boiled and distilled and from here, the purest form of pristine white fenny pours out from tubes in a steady stream. Very rarely, like in SVD, is it distilled for the third time to produce this very potent fenny. � You can go around my plant and see for yourself that we use only the very best of ingredients to bring you my top quality fenny, no adulteration touches my process,� he explains. Cashew fenny Most cashew fenny producers in Goa still use the traditional pot-still method and in which the extracted juice after fermentation is distilled in large clay or copper pots (bahann). This is the process that gives the liquor its unique flavour and many times, this is a little cottage industry in the villages around. The cashew tree is the native of the West Indies, though it came to Goa via Brazil and the Portuguese over 400 years ago. However old timers feel the technique of making the fenny has been borrowed from the goans who have traditionally made coconut fenny. Coconut trees too are native to Goa and the word fenny comes from the word fenn which means froth or foam. Whatever its origins, fenny has come to be known today as the original Goan alcohol. Over the years of course, adulteration has come into this avenue as well and cheap white liquor to which, the essence of cashew is added has been passed off as the real liquor. Earlier, the perception was that fenny was the poor man�s drink. So, local liquor barons like V Vaz, who has a brand of fenny called �Big Boss� took over the unorganised market and began his top quality big brand. He has even put a real cashew apple in his fenny so that consumers abroad can get to see what a cashew apple looks like! With Goa becoming an international tourist destination, unique goan liquors like the fenny have caught the tourist�s eye. There is also talk about patenting the fenny like basmati and neem. There are plans afoot of bringing all the cashew fenny producers together under one umbrella to create a competitive quality product, which will be internationally respected. Whatever happens in the future, there is one very important point that fenny in whatever its avataar, will remain uniquely Goan! *** Thanks to http://www.goanvoice.org.uk for the link -FN
