Making Makgeolli at Susubori Academy (pt.1)

    This past Saturday, we found ourselves making a traditional rice liquor at the newly opened Susubori Academy in Sodaemun. Establish in only September of this year, its mission is to teach traditional liquor-making techniques to both Koreans and foreigners, whether tourist or expat, and to spread awareness of artisan liquor in Korea.

    While drinking culture is firmly entrenched in Korea, it is frequently at local bars, known as hofs, and the drink in question is almost always a mass-produced industrial effort the likes of which companies like Jinro are behind. Jinro soju, to take one example, is not even soju in the strict sense, in that the final distilled product is watered down from an alcohol-only concentrate that has nothing in common with the traditional drink, distilled after weeks of yeast and bacterial fermentation produces cheongju, a low-proof liquor of 15-18% alcohol by volume. This cheongju, in the traditional method, is skimmed from the top of fermentation pots and the remaining layer, called takju, is filtered and then combined with water to produce the more widely known makgeolli, which commonly contains 6-8% alcohol by volume.

    Few Koreans even are aware of the distinction: companies like Jinro produce massive supplies of industrial alcohol quickly and perpetually, pushing domestic liquor prices down to price points unheard of in my own country. A 370ml bottle of soju can come as cheaply as 1,500krw in some neighborhoods and rarely exceeds 3kkrw (the abbreviation for 'thousand Korean won' that will be used here on out) but the key difficulty in getting local artisan alcohol is lack of distribution as well as,in the case of makgeolli, its relatively brief shelf life. Makgeolli that far exceeds the industry standard is made even within Seoul's city limits, but simply does not meet the same level of production put out by companies like Jinro, and that the greatest variety of makgeolli houses lies beyond the city limits, and indeed all across Korea, means that that variety is experiences only by those local to the manufacturer or someone lucky enough to be within proximity of an establishment that specializes in artisan makgeolli.