“Korean alcohol doesn’t aim to be precise and perfect; it seduces.”
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 whiteBut, 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. There’s an old saying in Korea: “To know the politics of a village, taste their alcohol.
A 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. We’d gathered a little group of Korean American friends to eat, drink and brew, a yogurt-tart cloudy rice beer that Koreans have been drinking for centuries.
By 1965, the Park Chung-hee dictatorship banned the use of rice in alcohol production because of war, hunger and rice shortages. But hard times never stopped people from drinking; the opposite is often truer. Instead, soju makers looked for the cheapest sources of starch they could find, distilling tapioca and sweet potatoes up to Everclear levels of alcohol content, then watering it down and adding sweeteners.
“The chance and improvisation aspect is so alluring,” Yong Ha wrote to me recently. Back at Susan’s kitchen, it struck me, looking around at the huge windows and the rice cooling in front of an open side door, that what we are doing would have been illegal in our grandmothers’ generation.
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