The requested URL /showthread.php?t=287018 was not found on this server.After doing some research on various websites, I decided to make my own version of Makkoli (or Makgeolli), which is basically Korean-style rice wine. It's like Japanese nigori (cloudy) sake, but the basic difference is that Makkoli is made mainly from sweet rice (mochi rice). I had a real fun making it. Making the nice chewy rice is an important part of making good makkoli. I decided to make it with 100% sweet rice, with my double-lid donabe rice cooker, "Kamado-san". It's a simple sweet rice...3 rice-cups (540 ml) of sweet rice ("mochi rice") with the same amount of water. Rice was pre-soaked in water for 30 minutes. The rice was cooked so nicely and I just couldn't help tasting it...it tasted so delicious. I wished I could've just eaten a big bowl of it. If you’re not Korean and you’ve heard of makgeolli (pronounced MAHK-oh-lee), it may have been through the handful of trend pieces that have appeared over the past 10 years.

Publications from CNN to the Wall Street Journal have traced the resurgence of nongju, another name for makgeolli, which means “farmer’s liquor.” This centuries-old unfiltered grain alcohol is brewed to about 6 or 8 percent alcohol by volume with rice as its primary sugar source; its distinctive milky-white appearance, sweet-sour flavor profile, and light effervescence are charming in a way that might perplex the uninitiated. Once the most consumed alcohol in the country, makgeolli suffered as younger generations of Koreans turned away from the “drink of peasants” and toward foreign specialties like beer. But earlier this decade, makgeolli became hot again: Bars dedicated to serving it have popped up throughout South Korea, rappers wave plastic bottles of it in music videos, and celebrities drink boutique versions. Also, it remains inexpensive, which is sometimes unfashionable but always appealing. Makgeolli is still relatively obscure in the U.S., but Cody Burns — the brewer at Seattle’s Girin Steakhouse, one of the city’s upscale odes to Korean food — is working to change that.

Girin opened two years ago in the Pioneer Square neighborhood, just south of downtown; late last year, the restaurant got its domestic winery license to make its own makgeolli after nearly two years of wrangling with the government about how to classify and permit the process. “What drew me in was how symbiotically makgeolli went with food,” Burns said. “The naturally occurring acidity and carbonation in makgeolli works as a really nice palate cleanser in between bites.” But Burns had never homebrewed in his life and couldn’t find much information about the makgeolli process in English, so his results for the first half year were, as he describes it, “pretty abysmal.” After some pointers from makgeolli brewing instructor Stephanie Ji-A Lee at Susubori Academy, though, he struck gold, and he now he refines his process in a tiny room above the bar at Girin. Burns brews his makgeolli traditionally, in the same porous clay crocks that would be used for making kimchi or other pickles.

The process means a unique character builds over time, as with sourdough. He’d like to experiment with encouraging this continuous fermentation process, though for now he cleans and sanitizes the containers between each batch, and his makgeolli gets most of its funkiness from fermentation driven by nuruk, which Burns orders from Korea.cases of wine for sale uk Nuruk is a dry cake of wheat, barley, and rice that hosts a variety of wild yeasts, bacteria, and koji mold spores; best wine areas in spainthese go to work on cooked sweet rice, turning starches into simple sugars then into alcohol over the course of a week. best cheap rose wine ukUnpasteurized, these tiny powerhouses will allow the beverage to further mature in the bottle, coaxing complex enzymes and flavor compounds from a drink that beautifully complements the spicy, sweet, sour, and savory notes so prevalent in Korean cooking.best online wine sites

You might not know any of this, however, if you’ve only ever tried a cheap plastic bottle of imported makgeolli. Before making their way stateside, these imports have to be pasteurized for shelf life, stunting the drink’s growth and highlighting single-noted sweetness over complexity. “I found it to be interesting, but I wasn’t super impressed,” Burns says of the insipid stuff available in America. where to buy wine stationBut when he and the Girin team visited Korea, Burns fell in love. best seller wine in usa“Sitting in a little tent-restaurant outside of the fish market, I had real homemade, alive makgeolli for the first time,” he says. “Right then and there I was like, ‘Why is this not a thing? I want to make this.’” Burns touts the freshness of his makgeolli, an important quality in a country otherwise awash in pasteurized approximations.

Makgeolli isn’t perishable, per se, as its yeast and bacteria create an environment hostile to spoilage, but its effervescence increases over time, its flavors change, and it has a disputed shelf life. At Girin, Burns tries to sell his makgeolli bottles for the time period between two days and two weeks, at which point he thinks the flavors become less palatable — before reaching another high point at five months. Before serving it to guests, he decants his makgeolli into golden tea kettles; guests pour from these into small bowls that they use as drinking vessels. Burns isn’t the first to try to introduce Americans to fresh makgeolli, though he’s in a small field. New York City restaurant Take 31, a gastropub in Koreatown, has a popular house-made “makgulli” that it serves icy with add-ins like yuzu and banana. Chicago’s Slow City Brewery was the country’s largest and highest-profile makgeolli maker when it opened in 2013, partly thanks to support from parent company Baesangmyun, a longstanding Korean alcohol producer and owner of a spirits museum.

Slow City went all in, making its makgeolli the right way, down to breathable bottle caps that allow the beverage to continue fermenting in the bottle without exploding. Unfortunately this feature also drastically limited its shipping potential. After a couple of years and despite a fair amount of media attention, Slow City disappeared quietly. Burns heard a rumor that the brewery had a falling out with its Korean parent; he also hears suggestions that some American-based graduates of a Korean makgeolli brewing course want to band together to buy Slow City and revive it, a plan he supports. But likely the first makgeolli maker in the country has brewed a fresh version in relative obscurity — hidden away an hour and a half northeast of New York City by car — for five years. Dudukju owner Rosalyn Kim, who emigrated from Korea 30 years ago, also got her start by partnering with a South Korean brewery, Andong HaeKok, where she learned her technique and obtains her nuruk starter to this day.

Since 2012, she has sold her brand, NY Mak, from her small Wurtsboro farm and to a handful of liquor stores and Korean restaurants in the Queens neighborhood of Flushing. But she says she operates her facility well below capacity because she simply hasn’t encountered enough demand for the drink. “It’s unknown to many people, and it’s hard to handle,” she says, which means it can’t travel far. In its unpasteurized form, makgeolli is truly a locavore’s dream. Kim says her live makgeolli goes through at least four distinct phases of bottle maturation. Her window of opportunity is perhaps a little wider than Burns’, but her small hometown has no built-in market, and she insists on replacing bottles that sit in restaurants or liquor stores longer than desired. It’s partly why she’s cautious about opening new accounts at places where staff might not be motivated or educated enough about the product to move it at the proper rate. She suggests that true makgeolli connoisseurs tend to develop taste preferences;

similarly to wine lovers, they walk a fine line as they age vintages to evoke new and delicious flavors, balancing the risk of losing a bottle to undesirable and potentially unpredictable shifts. Leiser Liquors is a family-run liquor store that has an entire section dedicated to Korean beverages. Employee Romeo Ruiz says that Kim’s NY Mak is the second-best-selling makgeolli at the store, after a Korean brand. “At first it didn’t [sell well, so Kim] had to buy back the spoiled bottles, but now it’s okay,” he says. “We’re in Flushing in the middle of a big Korean neighborhood, so customers come in and know what they want already. Only a few non-Koreans come in and ask about it.” That will likely change. Two decades ago, unfiltered Belgian-style wheat beer was a hard sell, too; just ask Allagash Brewing Company founder Rob Tod, who says he couldn’t give his flagship Allagash White away when he started his small operation in Maine. After 22 years of craft beer growth and education, though, that same cloudy beer is on tap in hundreds of bars and considered one of the world’s best.

Meanwhile, even more esoteric styles, like wild-fermented sours, have amassed their own serious followings. Point being, Americans have a tendency to first balk, then embrace the unusual, and makgeolli is certainly that. In Seattle, Burns has been amazed at diners’ positive responses to the drink. He assumed it would be an acquired taste, but found that “people take to it right away.” Of course, he benefits from a built-in market in a city of nearly a million, teeming with curious tourists and tech money. The two house versions of makgeolli — one cask-strength at 12 or 13 percent alcohol by volume, the other diluted — are highlighted on the first page of Girin’s beverage menu, and knowledgeable staff are on hand to ease people into the new experience. Given the reception, Burns is ambitious: He’s testing new recipes, exploring options for packaging his product for retail sales, training an assistant brewer, and planning to upgrade to an off-site brewery when, not if, demand allows.