Making Tuba:

At mid-day, this gentleman attends to one of his tuba-producing trees. The stalk he is sitting on, with the young coconuts, is the same type of stalk that is cut much earlier and the sap drained off to make tuba.

"To make tuba," Mariano explains, "first you choose a tree. People say there are different sort of signs. People say if a tree has all these kind the brown stuff; or if it is wider in the trunk than most of these coconut trees—bigger and tougher—then it has more juice. Some people say when you look at the, it’s like a tentacle stuff. If it’s longer, then the tree has more juice. What I believe in is a tree that attracts more flies, because when it sprouts up they can smell the juice. They come after it."

"Why we find the lizard on the coconut tree is because they would climb up and look for the newly opened ones. I think it has a smell that also attracts flies, and the lizards go after the flies. And when one of the stalks is newly sprouted, the color of the inside is similar to the color of this lizard: sort of yellowish. So it’s all camouflaged and still, and it goes after the flies.

"The flower stalk is what we cut to draw the sap from. When that stalk opens, then young coconuts start forming on it. You must choose the right time to cut the first stalk. So once you find that right type of tree, then you observe the stalk. The first one comes out, then there will be the second one.

"And then the third one, we call it ngiilpiipi. Ngiilpiipi is like the beak of a newly hatched chick. Piipi is a chick. Ngiil is teeth. So when you find the third stalk just starting to stick out of the tree, then you know that the first stalk is ready to be cut. "

The coconut-tree lizard.

A coconut shell is suspended at the end of the cut stalk, to catch the sap. A piece of coconut sheath is wrapped over it to keep out rainwater and flies.

"And so you keep on cutting the first one, trimming that stalk, because after a few hours the air dries up the end of that and it just plugs up the sap from flowing. So you have to cut it morning, noon, and evening. And at night you can leave it, you don’t have to cut it at midnight because during the night it’s colder. Then there is a cover is to keep the rain water out of the juice. And keep the flies out.

"Each man cuts his own tuba tree. And the number of trees to cut really depends on the individual. If he’s not lazy he can cut up as many as ten trees. That’s in climbing all that, three times a day.

"Some good trees that produce more of this sap, you don’t have to cut it at noon. Just cut it in the morning and cut it in the evening. The open cut of that stalk doesn’t dry up because of all the sap flowing.

"But most trees dry up. So when you go out there around noon, it’s dry, and you have to refresh it."

Ngiilpiipi: the new shoot is like the beak of a young bird, poking through.

"How long can you keep getting juice? Some good trees, the right trees, they trim it down to the tree truck until you cannot get that shell to it. They keep trimming it back. Those who are really good in cutting the tuba tree, the term is yiuloel yiig. Yiuloel yiig is the scale of a fish. That’s how thin you slice it off the stalk. So it takes time to shorten and it gives time for these others to come out and get ready. You can have up to four—cutting four stalks on one single tree. In other words, you collect more juice from those four stalks just from that single tree.

"Some people who cut bigger or thicker from their stalks, they tend to run out of stalk before these others are ready. So we termed those really good in cutting, like we refer to a thin fish scale."

"What you do with the juice depends on what type of tuba you’re making. If you’re cutting to ferment tuba, then you just pour out of the shell into another shell, which you use for collecting all this juice. When it’s full then you transfer it to a bigger container. That’s for the evening consumption.

"This fermented one, you don’t clean the shell. Inside it has the fermented stuff that builds on the inside of the shell. The juice ferments by that evening, and you drink it the same day. Or you can drink it the next day.

"But after the second day it’s, the taste is turning a little bit vinegary. You also can make vinegar from that type of juice."

Mariano pours a glass of fermented tuba.

A bottle of liiuch—thick, sweet tuba syrup. For Americans, this would be comparable to Maple syrup—boiled down from a thin sap into something thick, sweet, and somewhat smokey-tasting.

"The sweet tuba that turns into a sweet syrup, you have to clean the shell. Sprinkle sand in the shell, put water in there and you get a stick and you clean it with that, and you pour out the sand and you rinse the shell. Then it’s ready.

"You must overturn it before the next collection of the juice so that the shell dries up before you collect the juice, so there’s no water in there, only just tree sap. When you bring it down that’s sweet and if you set it for a day or two, it becomes sour and eventually it’ll turn into vinegar.

"Now, to make the syrup, as you collect the juice, the sweet juice, just pour it in pots and you start boiling it. It’ll evaporate whatever water is left and it leaves the sugar, it becomes sugar. And you can keep this for years."

Pacific Worlds > Yap: Ulithi > The Land > Planting