Light-Aroma Baijiu (清香型白酒, qingxiang baijiu)

Light-aroma baijiu is the northern style of Chinese grain spirit, associated above all with Xinghua village in Fenyang, Shanxi, where a spirit of this kind has long been made and where the name Fenjiu is protected as a Geographical Indication. The category is a modern classification of the aroma families of baijiu, a frame drawn up in the twentieth century to sort a very varied craft, and it should be read as a way of ordering the spirits rather than as a statement of ancient practice. Its makers are distillery families and state-descended distilleries of the north, and it belongs to the tradition of solid-state fermentation, in which the grain is never slurried in water but ferments as a damp mass.

A clear, colourless spirit distilled from sorghum (Sorghum bicolor) and fermented with a daqu starter of barley and pea, cured at a lower temperature than the starters of the sauce-aroma style. The fermentation is conducted in buried earthenware jars, and the traditional method is described as qingzheng qingshao er ci qing: the grain is steamed clean, fermented, and distilled clean, then the fermented grain is distilled a second time in a second clean cycle. The aroma is fruity and floral, with a dry, clean attack and a short, sweet finish, and no heaviness of cellar or funk. It is bottled commonly between 42 and 53 per cent alcohol by volume, and it is served in small cups at the banquet table.

It is drunk at banquets in small cups with toasts, alongside cold dishes, salted and braised meats, dumplings and the wheat foods of the north, which is the cooking of the region that makes it. Its clean, dry edge cuts through fat and salt and resets the palate between dishes, and because it carries little aroma of its own to compete, it does not clash with delicate or sour dishes. In the banquet custom described in Invitation to a Banquet, the spirit is a vehicle for ceremony and for the host's generosity as much as a flavour.