In his home in Taman Tun Dr Ismail, Kuala Lumpur, 25-year-old Edric Lee Mun Foong is hard at work. First, he places a funnel atop a narrow-rimmed glass bottle. Then he tips the contents of a humongous receptacle filled with the sieved contents obtained from a mixture of water, pineapple slices, cinnamon sticks and palm sugar through the funnel’s narrow chambers, waiting to see how much fizz is generated, before he tops it up again.
The drink Lee has hand-crafted at home is a fermented Mexican beverage called tepache and is just one of the many fermented products that he makes (including kimchi, sauerkraut and fermented tomatoes with thyme) under the auspices of his home business, Aged.