‘Feni’ fun time at Ancestral Goa

Courtesy: The Navhind Times, April 30, 2010

MARGAO: The festival of ‘Feni’ began at Ancestral Goa, The Big Foot, Loutolim on April 24 where stalls displaying varied products of cashew - the nut and the coconut - vied for attention with stalls selling flavoured distil ‘Feni’.

These were either flavoured with ginger, lemon-grass, herb, lime, coriander, cumin and the ‘Dudhshiri’ roots. This festival showcased the traditional flavoured alcoholic varieties.

Feni the traditional alcoholic beverage of Goa – both of the cashew and coconut – is still considered to be a poor man’s drink. But this crystalline extract has a history that is as colourful as it is colourless.

Coconut feni - is made from the sap of the coconut palm, and cashew feni is made from the fermented juice of cashew fruit, is also called ‘caju feni’. Recently cashew feni got its GI registration as a specialty alcoholic beverage from Goa. There are known to exist around 4,000 such traditional mini-distilleries or stills in Goa that manufacture cashew feni and about 2,200 manufacturing coconut feni. About 75 per cent of stills making cashew fenny are in north Goa while the rest are in south Goa. Of the stills making coconut feni, south Goa has about 65 per cent of them while the rest are in north Goa.

The friars are said to have taught the locals the process of distilling the beverage and down the ages this came to be a process that got improved on and evolved into the variety that we have before us, today. The bright red, gold and pale yellow luscious fruit that is the cashew apple had finally come into its own.

Posted via web from The Creative Den - Rajesh Hingoranee