JUICE AND PALM WINE

Palm wine can probably be called a national alcohol.

Handcrafted, it is prepared from the juice of the palm tree itself produced from the morning harvest of the juice of the flowers of the sugar palm trees.

Peasants make dizzying climbs on rudimentary bamboo ladders hung along the trunks to reach the top of the palm tree where fruits and flowers are gathered.

We differentiate between palm juice, known as 'soft' palm juice 

Toek Tnaot P'aem, a light and sweet juice that is very refreshing, and so-called 'sour' palm juice, Toek Tnaot Chour being in actually fermented palm juice, and therefore alcoholic.

This, it seems, if abused, can cause severe headaches in drinkers for several days.

Although they are becoming scarce, street vendors, on foot or by bicycle, pass through town or crisscross the country lanes all day long to sell the precious beverage taken from the palm trees and then poured into long bamboo tubes. Sometimes more than thirty kilometers are covered by these vendors before they can start their tour of the city.

If the woody flavor given by the small bamboo cups in which juice and wine are served agrees very nicely with the sweetness of palm juice, some fragile stomachs will prefer to turn to palm wines duly bottled and marketed by a few. local palm sugar farmers, whose taste, however, has little to do with artisanal wine.

A bamboo tube, around 2,500 riel, 4,000 riel for the largest, 500 riel for a bucket. A 50cl bottle costs around US $ 5 in mini-mart.