The Tapey (What the Jar Creates)

What the Jar Creates

A Love Letter to Tapey and the People of Besao Who Still Make It

There is a gusi tucked somewhere in a Besao household right now. You may not see it immediately; it could be sitting quietly in the corner of an old kitchen, wrapped or covered in banana leaf and settled beneath the weight of patience and time, its clay sides cool to the touch even in the afternoon warmth. The people of Besao have always known where the jar is, and they have always known what is happening inside it- the slow, sacred alchemy of diket and bubod, of rice and yeast and mountain air, becoming something altogether different from what they were.

That something is tapey; and if you are from Besao, you already know this. You have tasted it at weddings, at begnas, at the communal table of the dap-ay. You have seen an elder pour just a small cupful at the feet of an offering, a quiet acknowledgment to Kabunyan that abundance flows both upward and downward. You have watched your lola crush the bubod between her palms with the concentrated expression of someone who knows that the difference between good tapey and merely passable tapey lives in this single moment of distribution. Perhaps you were the child who was shooed away from the kitchen with a firm hand and the words unforgettable in their peculiar gravity: "Maid um-umtot." No farting. The spirit of the tapey was present, and decorum was required. Others prefer to prepare their tapey as early as 1:00 AM so that no one is around except you, the alchemist and the spirit of wine. 

For all of Besao. It is an attempt to hold up a lamp to something you have always lived inside of; to walk around a tradition that is as ordinary as the morning fog over the Cordillera range and as extraordinary as the rice terraces carved into the hillsides by your ancestors with nothing but their hands and their conviction that the mountain would yield.

I. The Rice That Begins Everything

Tapey does not begin in the gusi. It does not begin with the bubod, though that is perhaps the most magical ingredient of all. Tapey begins, as most things in Besao do, with rice; specifically, with diket, the glutinous or sticky rice that has been cultivated on these mountain slopes for generations beyond counting. The Spanish expedition that made its way into the Cordillera in 1665 found rice terraces already carved deep into the mountainsides, already ancient, already fed by small streams that the Kankanaey had learned to coax and direct with a patience that defies the modern imagination. Those terraces fed the diket that fed the tapey that fed the rituals that fed the community. Nothing in Besao has ever been accidental.

Of the varieties of diket used in tapey, the kintuman holds a special place in the hearts of the mountain brewer. It is a violet-red sticky rice, its grains carrying a pigment that bleeds into the wine and gives good tapey its characteristic amber hue, the color that some have likened to old sherry or to sunlight passing through a church window at a particular hour. The balatinao is another variety in the conversation; darker in color, drier in nature, suited for tapey meant to be stored and aged rather than consumed young. The choice of rice is not merely practical. It is an expression of intention, an early declaration of the kind of tapey one is setting out to make, and by extension, the kind of occasion one is preparing for.

The cooking of the diket is the first act of transformation, and it must be done with restraint. Too much water, and the rice becomes too soft, too wet, too eager; it will ferment unevenly, and the tapey will suffer for it. The cook aims for a rice that is just-done, na-ilowagan as the Kankanaey say, meaning the boiling water has been absorbed and the bubbles have settled, but the grains still hold their shape and their dignity. This is a judgment call, the kind that cannot be reduced to minutes on a timer. It is knowledge carried in the hands and eyes of the maker, knowledge passed from grandmother to granddaughter over decades of kitchens smelling of woodsmoke and steam.

II. The Bubod, or What the Mountain Gives

If rice is the body of tapey, the bubod is its soul. This flat, disc-shaped starter culture, cream-white, chalky, smelling faintly of herbs and old earth, is the ingredient that separates rice from rice wine, cooked grain from living ferment. Inside each disc of bubod is a community of microorganisms; the molds Aspergillus and Rhizopus, the yeast Saccharomyces, and the bacteria Lactobacillus, all living together in a consortium that is, when you consider it closely, a kind of civilization. They convert starch into sugar, and sugar into alcohol, producing a drink that is tangy and sweet and slightly warm at the back of the throat, 14 to 19 percent alcohol by some estimates, though the old makers of Besao did not require a hydrometer to know when they had made something good.

Traditional bubod is itself a deeply local artifact. Its recipe varies from community to community, from family to family, and the specific blend of wild herbs used to cultivate the starter culture has often been treated as proprietary knowledge, passed down within households, guarded with the same care as land rights or family names. The herbs carry ambient yeasts and microbes native to their particular environment, and this is why tapey made in Besao will always taste subtly different from tapey made in Sagada or Sabangan or Banaue; the bubod has absorbed the Besao air, the Besao soil, the Besao mountain. It is, in the truest sense, a local wine.

The bubod must be crushed to a fine powder before it meets the rice. This is the moment of the even distribution that old tapey makers speak of with reverence; the powder must be spread across the spread-out, cooled diket as evenly as snow falling on flat ground. No pockets of over-fermentation, no dead zones where the yeast cannot reach. The grandmother of a good brewer has probably said, at some point: "The secret to a good tapey lies in the quality of the distribution of the bubod." And she was not wrong. She was, as grandmothers tend to be in these mountains, exactly right.

III. Silence, Solitude, and the Spirit of the Tapey

Here is where tapey-making in Besao becomes something the food scientists and the fermentation hobbyists of the lowlands cannot fully account for. The protocol surrounding the preparation is not merely hygienic; it is spiritual. The old folks say the surroundings must be totally quiet during the making. No disturbances. No noise. No visitors dropping in at the wrong moment. And, most famously, definitively, with an authority that tolerated no argument: no farting.

This last prohibition has gotten a fair amount of gentle mockery over the years from people who learned about it secondhand, but consider for a moment that it is not without a certain practical logic. Fermentation is a process acutely sensitive to contamination. Unwanted bacterial strains introduced at the wrong moment, whether from curious visitors breathing over the spread-out rice or from any number of indelicate intrusions, can turn a promising batch of tapey toward sourness or worse. The prohibition on disturbance is, at its core, a sanitation protocol dressed in the language of the sacred. The spirit of the tapey, in this reading, is not metaphysical fantasy; it is the culture itself, the living community of microbes in the bubod, that must not be disturbed.

But to reduce it only to that is to do the tradition a disservice. The Applai Kankanaey of Besao have always understood the making of tapey as an act that partakes of the sacred. The drink would be offered to Kabunyan at the begnas ceremony, the great communal ritual of thanksgiving and petition performed at the dap-ay; it would be poured into the hands of the mambunong, the ritual priest, who would hold the cup and recite prayers beside the food and the sacrificial animal, asking the ancestors and the spirit world for their continued presence and favor. Something that would touch the divine required a kind of purity in its making. The silence was not superstition. It was preparation.

Some old tapey makers in the Cordillera were known to begin the preparation between midnight and dawn, choosing the hours when the rest of the world was asleep and the risk of contamination or disturbance was lowest. The night, in this tradition, is not a time of danger but of focus; the house is quiet, the fire in the dalikan burns low, and the maker moves through the familiar steps with the unhurried concentration of someone performing a ritual, which is precisely what they are doing.

IV. Into the Jar, Into the Dark

Once the bubod has been worked into the cooled rice, the mixture goes into the gusi, the clay jar that is the final vessel of transformation. Clay has been the container of choice for generations, and not by accident. The earthenware is porous enough to breathe, it moderates temperature, and it imparts nothing foreign to the ferment inside. Plastic, as any self-respecting Besao brewer will tell you, adds a plasticky flavor; glass is too cold; metal is simply wrong. The gusi is the correct container because it has always been the correct container, because it is what the tapey knows, because the wisdom of centuries has tested every alternative and returned to clay.

The jar is covered with banana leaf, then sealed; not airtight, because in the first days of fermentation the process requires a certain amount of oxygen, the bacteria and molds beginning their aerobic work before the yeasts take over and the environment turns anaerobic, the alcohol rising. Leave too small an opening and the jar may build pressure; leave too large an opening and insects find their way in. The banana leaf, with its natural oils and its just-sufficient seal, is the solution the Besao kitchen arrived at a very long time ago.

The jar is then stored in a warm place, traditionally near the dalikan, the hearth, where the residual heat of the cooking fire keeps the ferment active and happy. In Besao, with its cool mountain temperatures, warmth is something the tapey needs to be given deliberately; the microbes in the bubod prefer warmth, and a cold ferment is a slow and uncertain one. Four to five days will produce tapey that is still sweet and mild, young and friendly; this is the tapey that children were once sometimes given a small sip of, before more cautious heads prevailed. As the weeks and months pass, the sweetness gives way to a deeper, drier complexity; the longer a tapey rests in its gusi, the more serious it becomes, the more it resembles not a casual drink but a considered one.

What is left in the jar after the liquid tapey has been poured off is called sigtim, and the people of Besao have never been ones to waste anything. Sigtim, the fermented rice sediment, goes into food; it is added to native fish, to wading or kaling, giving the dish a fermented depth that plain salt cannot replicate. Nothing is discarded. The jar continues to give.

V. Tapey and the Occasions That Call for It

To understand tapey in Besao, you must understand that it has never been a casual drink in the way that a bottle of soft drink is casual. It appears at the moments when life turns a corner; when a young couple is to be wed, when the rice has been harvested and the community gathers to thank whatever forces, divine and earthly, made the harvest possible, when the begnas is called and the dap-ay fills with the sound of gongs and the voices of the elders, when two families meet to observe the sukat di makan, the exchange of food before a marriage, and the gusi of tapey moves between them as a sign that something precious is being shared.

The sukat di makan, known in Besao and Sagada as the alis di makan, is one of the most telling contexts for the wine's social significance. The ceremony involves the exchange of traditional foods between the families of the future spouses; native chicken and/or pig, diket, root crops, dried corn, legumes, and always tapey. The exchange is reciprocal; both families give, both families receive. The elders say that if this tradition is not observed, the families cannot eat or drink in each other's homes until it has been done. The tapey, in this context, is not refreshment. It is a language; it says: we are opening ourselves to you, we offer you what our best knowledge and our most patient labor have produced, and we ask you to drink it as a seal between us.

At the begnas, the great community ceremony of the Applai tribe; observed in Besao, Sagada, Tadian, Sabangan, and Bauko; the tapey flows with the gong music and the dancing and the chanting. The ceremony includes gong playing, dancing, the communal sharing of food, and the drinking of rice wine; it closes with a ritual at the sacred tree, offerings to Kabunyan, the sharing of butchered meat among households, and the reading of the bile of the sacrificial animal for omens. Tapey is present at every stage. It is not ornamentation. It is substance.

VI. What Is Being Lost, and What Must Not Be

It would be dishonest to write about tapey in Besao without acknowledging that the tradition is under pressure. The pressures are familiar ones; the migration of young people to Baguio and Manila and farther still, the availability of commercial "rice wine" in bottles that bears the name tapuey on its label but carries none of the community knowledge of the gusi and the bubod and the midnight preparation, the generational break that happens when a grandmother dies before she can teach the even distribution of the crushed bubod to the granddaughter who was, at the critical moment, away at school. These are not dramatic events. They are quiet losses, and they are happening in slow motion.

The bubod itself is a carrier of this fragility. Because the starter culture is made from local herbs and ambient microbes native to the Besao environment, it cannot be replicated elsewhere with the same character. A bubod from Abatan, Benguet, though widely regarded as high quality, will produce a different tapey from a bubod made in the household of a Besao elder who has been cultivating her starter culture for thirty years, feeding it back into itself, maintaining a living tradition of microbial culture that is, in the most literal sense, irreplaceable if it dies. When the bubod recipe dies with the last person who knows it, nothing in a bottle or a laboratory will bring it back.

And yet Besao is not a community that has been passive in the face of change. The terraces are still worked. The gongs still sound at the dap-ay. The Ubaya Festival still gathers the community in celebration of what the mountain and the labor of its people have produced together. And there are still households in Besao where the gusi is tucked in its warm corner, where a woman moves through her kitchen in the early hours with fine powder between her palms, and where the house has been asked, in advance, to observe a particular silence.

VII. A Drink for the Living and the Dead

There is something in the philosophy of tapey that the Applai Kankanaey of Besao have always understood intuitively, something that the wider world is only now beginning to articulate in the language of fermentation science and cultural heritage studies. The drink is a conversation between the living and the dead; between the living maker and the ancestors who developed the bubod recipe; between the living community and the ancestral knowledge encoded in every terrace, every seed variety, every clay jar. When the mambunong holds the cup of tapey at a ritual and speaks his prayer, he is not performing a quaint custom. He is maintaining a connection that runs in both directions, backward into deep time and forward into a future that the community is, through this act, claiming the right to participate in.

This is why it matters that Besao keeps making tapey the old way; not out of nostalgia, not for the tourism brochure, but because the practice is a form of memory that cannot be downloaded or summarized or preserved in amber. It must be practiced. The bubod must be crushed and spread. The diket must be cooked with the right amount of water. The house must be asked for silence. The jar must be sealed with banana leaf and placed near the warmth of the fire. And then you wait; patient, unhurried, trusting the process, trusting the ancestors who refined it, trusting the mountain that gave you the rice and the herbs and the cold clean air that shaped the yeasts that shaped the wine.

Coda: On the First Sip

When you finally open the gusi, the smell reaches you before anything else does. It is warm and sweet and faintly wild, something between bread and honey and an old forest after rain. The color, if you have used kintuman, is that sweet sherry red that deserves a better word than red. You pour it into a cup; small, at first, because good tapey deserves to be approached with the same respect that went into its making. You drink it cool or at room temperature, and it arrives in the mouth as something sweet and tangy and quietly serious, with a warmth at the finish that the sherry comparison does not fully capture, because sherry was not made by someone's grandmother on a Cordillera mountainside at midnight, under the instruction that the house must be still and that no one, under any circumstances, must fart.

That is tapey. That is Besao's. And it is still being made.

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