But hard times never stopped people from drinking the opposite is often truer. Brewing was moved to factories and taxed, becoming a source of revenue for the expanding empire.īy 1965, the Park Chung-hee dictatorship banned the use of rice in alcohol production because of war, hunger and rice shortages. By 1934, home-brewing was banned outright. It started with the gradual takeover of the Joseon Dynasty by the Japanese Empire at the beginning of the 20th century. And when you distill yakju, you end up with the fiery-bright, clear liquid known as soju.īut for most of the last century, brewing Korean alcohol with rice was banned, in one form or another, a casualty of the peninsula’s turbulent history. Filter out those clouds and you get yakju, a golden-amber “wine” that can range from cloyingly sweet and dense to green apple-tart and fizzy. Makgeolli falls under the umbrella of takju, the cloudy rice beer you get when you first strain your mash the results have a creamy, horchata-esque mouthfeel. Makgeolli is one drink in a family of Korean rice brews that can all be made by roughly the same process: Steam rice, mix it with water and nuruk, a wheat cake fermentation starter, and let the microbes go to work. The practice of making it at home was derailed in the last century, but a new generation of Koreans, both on the peninsula and in diaspora, are reclaiming old traditions.
We’d gathered a little group of Korean American friends to eat, drink and brew makgeolli, a yogurt-tart cloudy rice beer that Koreans have been drinking for centuries. There’s an old saying in Korea: “To know the politics of a village, taste their alcohol.” It harks back to an era when brewing was a resource-intensive luxury: If your village had good alcohol, it was a pretty good sign of peace and plenty.Ī few weeks ago, I stood in chef Susan Yoon’s sunny Mount Washington kitchen, cutting cheesecloth for an enormous steamer, while my friend Yong Ha Jeong weighed out kilos of uncooked sticky rice next to me. You might be familiar with green-glass bottles of soju from long nights out in Koreatown, or maybe you’ve ventured further afield and enjoyed some plastic bottles of fizzy white makgeolli at the same places.īut, despite their ubiquity, these modern incarnations of Korean rice brews are about as representative of Korean booze as wine coolers are of European viticulture: good cheap fun, but not nearly the whole story.
0 kommentar(er)
