Makgeolli

Rice wine brewing in Korea is traced back to the Three Kingdoms period, and during the Goryeo dynasty a version was known as ihwa-ju, "pear blossom wine," for the time of year it was traditionally made ¹. The name makgeolli itself is far younger: it first appears in an encyclopedia believed to date to the nineteenth century ². What has stayed constant across that span is the method, using rice, water and nuruk, a dried cake of grain carrying wild mould, yeast and bacteria together, which both breaks the rice's starch down to sugar and ferments it to alcohol in the same vessel ¹. Cloudy, low in alcohol next to distilled soju, and cheap to make at home, it became known as a farmer's drink, brewed in the countryside rather than bought ¹.

That home-brewing tradition was deliberately broken twice in the twentieth century. Under Japanese colonial rule, a licensing and tax system was imposed on home production, and by 1934 brewing makgeolli at home had been outlawed outright ¹². Decades later, in 1965, the South Korean government banned brewing with rice again, this time over rice shortages, and producers switched to wheat and barley for a generation ¹. Rice brewing was permitted again around 1990, though ordinary home brewing did not become fully legal again until years after that ¹.

The drink's recent revival among younger, urban drinkers has come largely through small breweries returning to traditional nuruk rather than the laboratory yeast and additives that filled the gap during the ban years, a shift Boksoondoga, a brewery founded in 2009 on a family recipe, is often credited with helping to popularise ². By the late 2010s South Korea counted several hundred small-scale makgeolli producers, a scale of production the drink had not seen since before the colonial ban ¹.