Deserted navy tunnels in Taiwan are currently residence to up to US$400 million-worth of Kinmen Kaoliang Liquor.
A new documentary series uncovering secrets about Taiwan’s Mega Factories has honed in on the Kinmen Kaoliang Liquor amenities, by considerably the major producer of spirits in the place.
Kinmen Kaoliang is the ideal offering spirit in Taiwan, with in excess of 45,000 litres eaten across the island just about every day. This is equivalent to 80% of all spirits eaten in Taiwan, which means Kinmen Kaoliang claims by significantly the greatest industry share of any Taiwanese distillery. It offering 20 million litres of Kaoliang on a yearly basis, practically two times the amount of whisky consumed in Taiwan.
Kaoliang’s identify derives from the Mandarin for cereal crop sorghum. The spirit has a prosperous heritage heading back to the past century. In accordance to the documentary, folks on the island farmed sorghum to make into liquor which was then traded for rice.
Taiwan’s Kinmen Islands are 200km from the Taiwanese mainland but just 2km from mainland China, which means that they had been made use of as portion of the entrance line of the Chinese civil war, with main struggle fought there in 1949.
The navy facility could since have been abandoned and repurposed for building liquor, but the strategies of making Kaoliang are the same as they ended up a century ago. The sorghum combination is fermented ahead of distilling, and aged for a variety of decades in advance of bottling.
These days, the tunnels applied throughout the combating are dwelling to the tanks utilised to age the 120-evidence spirit. As numerous as 3.5 million litres are held in these tanks, and the greatest of the underground cellars holds 64 stainless metal containers, stretching 8m large. These tunnels may not hold armed forces quality weapons any extended, but they are dwelling to US$400m-truly worth of liquor.
“We get as a lot treatment of it as we do our children,” stated Honyi Hsu, head of production portion, Kinmen Kaoliang Liquor, in the documentary.
Kinmen Kaoliang Liquor isn’t the only business using gain of deserted navy space. Hong Kong’s Crown Wine Cellars houses its wines in a pre-Entire world War II ammunition and weapons storage depot tucked deep into a wooded hillside. Examine more on that here.