Trying Korean Beer

Celebrating our Anniversary.

Sometimes I feel adventurous. At Miss Kim, a restaurant that we always enjoy, most of our food selections were already favorites. However, I picked a completely unknown beverage: Makku, a Korean rice beer, brewed near Seoul. The primary ingredient is fermented rice, and its alcohol content is around 6%.

Miss Kim, a Korean restaurant with innovative versions of the cuisine.  It’s very well-regarded.
I decided to try the Korean beer for a change. It was tangy but not very beer-like.

Rice beer (lower right in the photo) is white and opaque, without much foam — new to me!
The foods: carrot salad, sautéed broccoli with caramelized fish sauce, lettuce-and-pear salad, and smashed potatoes are all delicious favorites of ours. Our main course (not shown) was roast duck breast.

I was unable to find an indication of the alcohol content on the beer can. It also lacked the legally required
mention of the Michigan can deposit. I find this unusual. 

A Little Bit of History

An 18th century Korean drinking party by painter Shin-Yun Bok. (source)

Alcoholic beverages have been produced and consumed in Korea for centuries, and are mainly brewed from rice and a traditional yeast starter. According to an article at liquor.com: “This brewing system is at least 2,000 years old and was driven by jesa, or ancestor worship. Members of Korea’s noble class would offer their best crops, foods and homebrewed alcohol to their deceased forebears.”

European-style Korean beer is a recently introduced product, but a rice beverage called makgeolli — on which Makku is based — is an older Korean tradition. Makgeolli is low-alcohol, and some times called beer, sometimes wine.

An article in the LA Times (“The Secret History of Makgeolli”) explained how fermentation of rice was banned for a long time in Korea, but the tradition persisted illegally and in secret as a home-brewing activity, mainly done by women.  Makgeolli, as the article described it, was “yogurt-tart cloudy rice beer that Koreans have been drinking for centuries. 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.” 

More about the Korean brewing traditions that were forbidden in the 1960s because of rice shortages during the post-war era, and finally legalized again in the 1990s:

“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. 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.”

 The entry in Wikipedia considers makgeolli to be a wine, and describes it thus:

Makgeolli … sometimes anglicized to makkoli (/ˈmækəli/,^[1] MAK-ə-lee), is a Korean alcoholic drink. It is a milky, off-white, and lightly sparkling rice wine that has a slight viscosity, and tastes slightly sweet, tangy, bitter, and astringent. Chalky sediment gives it a cloudy appearance. As a low proof drink of six to nine percent alcohol by volume, it is often considered a "communal beverage" rather than hard liquor.

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