SINGAPORE – It was more than 30 years ago that Madam Yap Joo Eng first fell in love with the traditional red rice wine that ended up kick-starting her second career.

In the late 1980s, her then prospective mother-in-law, who hailed from Fuzhou, China, had prepared the heritage dish of red wine chicken mee sua for her when they met for the first time.

Madam Yap, who is from the Hokkien dialect group, had never tasted it before.

She recalls: “The colour was a scary red, but it was yummy. I fell in love with the chicken and the husband.”

Over the years, Madam Yap, now 61 with four adult children, mastered her mother-in-law’s homemade recipes of red rice wine and yellow rice wine.

Rice wine dishes featured in every celebration she cooked for, from Chinese New Year to birthdays.

Madam Yap, a former accountant, also fermented her own brews when her family of six lived in Shanghai for 12 years from 2002.

Her 65-year-old husband was then working as the general manager of a multinational company in the Chinese city, while Madam Yap worked at furniture giant Ikea in Shanghai in various roles, including as a purchasing manager, site manager and internal auditor.

Later, Madam Yap moved alone to Dubai for a two-year stint at Ikea there, returning to Singapore 10 years ago. Due to health issues, she took a five-year hiatus from work.

The homebound days at the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020 gave her time to experiment.

Her eldest child, tech professional Yap Jinyen, 32, saw her mother brewing red rice wine at home, and asked: “Why don’t you sell it?”

Madam Yap recounts: “I felt there was a void. I needed to find a purpose. She said, ‘Mummy, you need to do something with your life’, and I said, ‘Let’s go ahead.’”

That was the start of Ye Traditions (yetraditions.com), which uses the family name. Co-founded by mother and daughter, it sells red and yellow rice wines (from $16 for a 250ml bottle), as well as other products like red rice lees (from $17) and bentong ginger tea ($30).