On a stretch of Donggureung-ro, in Guri – a satellite city of Seoul – there is a small soju distillery where rice isn’t steamed, pounded or soaked into a sticky white pillow before being inoculated with nuruk the way Korean rice spirit has been traditionally distilled for centuries. 

Instead, the rice is roasted, like coffee beans, in an oven, then crushed, pitched into a stainless-steel fermenter with distiller’s yeast of the strain used in Scotch whisky before being double-distilled in a small pot still.

The result is an aromatic spirit with beautiful notes of puffed and slightly burnt rice that is nonetheless still called soju – Hwasim Soju (화심소주)– because in South Korea, that is what the law and the consumer will accept it as.

Founder and distiller of Hwasim Jujo, Oh Sumin, had his start in bartending.

Almost nothing about how it is made is what a soju traditionalist would recognise as soju, and almost everything about how it tastes – roasted sesame, petrol, dark earth, a long savoury finish – points halfway around the world towards Islay, the windswept Hebridean island whose peated malt whiskies have, in living memory, captured the imagination of what a “smoky” spirit is.

This is the good work of Oh Sumin (오수민), a young former bartender who in 2019 talked his way into a job at cult Islay whisky producer Ardbeg Distillery.

Sumin entered the drinks trade as a bartender and had experiences in Seoul, Melbourne the London bartending scene. After 7 odd years of working abroad, he figured he might finally return home. He decided to stop by Islay but fell in love with the place ad decided to stay for another bartending stint; Ardbeg’s Distillery Manager happened to walk into the bar where Sumin was working. After a solid cocktail and an earnest chat, he was swiftly offered a job as a bartender at Ardbeg’s visitor centre.

His time working in Islay is fondly recounted: he lived in an old camper van, practiced his Scottish accent in front of the mirror every night, and took the opportunity to learn everything he could about running a distillery, from watching how spirit is distilled in the stillhouse to being matured in warehouses.

Four years later, in 2023, Sumin opened a distillery of his own with the explicit, slightly mad ambition of building, as he puts it in a Korean-language interview, “a Korean Ardbeg”. The brandname he chose is Hwasim which refers to the expression “heart of fire”: both an Islay reference (all peated whisky is, at root, a story about fire) and a personal credo.

In the glass, you might find that Hwasimjujo’s spirit is equal parts soju- and not soju-like. Critics describe it as being nutty, savoury, gently smoky and even reminiscent of kerosene. To understand what Sumin has been distilling, it helps to start with what soju has traditionally been.

Setting aside the mass-produced industrial version that became popular since the 1970s’, soju in its classical form is rice fermented with nuruk (the wild-fungus wheat cake helps saccharify Korean grains) and distilled in an earthenwaresoju gori, yielding a clear spirit resembling vodka and shōchū. Over the last decade Korea has seen a craft-soju emergence. Within this revival, most makers – the likes of Hwayo, Toki, Tokki, Samhae – work within recognisably Korean technical templates: rice and nuruk, fermentation, pot distillation, sometimes long maturation in onggi earthenware.

Nuruk is the original Korean fermentation starter used to make almost all traditional Korean sools from makgeolli to soju.

Hwasim is legally and categorically a soju producer and its products are taxed and labelled as “jeungnyusik soju”, (distilled-style soju) within the small-batch, premium subcategory. Yet Hwasim uses neither nuruk, steamed rice nor earthenware pots. Instead, as the distillery uses purified enzymes for saccharification, the same whisky yeast employed by Scottish distilleries for fermentation, a relatively long one-week fermentation (Scottish distilleries typically run 48 to 72 hours), and a single pot still with copper filtration for two distillation passes – the first cut down to roughly 25% ABV, the second up to about 65%.

His Roasted Rice Soju begins its life as rice purchased from farms near Guri in Gyeonggi-do. Where a traditional soju distiller would polish and steam the rice, he keeps the whole grain and roasts it to “showcase the ingredient in its most scrumptious form.” The roasted rice achieves a dark, nutty, slightly bittersweet aroma which East Asians associate with scorched-rice crust at the bottom of a pot, and with hyeonmi-nokcha, brown-rice green tea. The Roasted Sweet Potato Soju follows the same logic with locally grown sweet potatoes roasted skin-on. None of this is traditional soju. All of it is, in Sumin’s framing, a bid to produce a Korean smokiness – an alternative to the peat smoke he can no longer source on this side of the world.

And where Korean tradition would call for an earthenware onggi rest of months, Hwasim's standard bottlings are released essentially unaged. Sumin deliberately avoids resting the spirit because the smoky aromas are more vivid in the unaged spirit. And where Korean producers historically pursue refinement and clarity, Sumin appears to chase what an Islay whisky fan would recognise as expressiveness: roasted, oily, savoury, textural, sweet-savoury all at once.

Sumin remains very direct about finding inspiration in his favourite Ardbeg whisky which supplied his original courage to defect from bar work into making. Speaking to a local magazine that asked what scent his life would carry if it were distilled to a single bottle, he answered in half-jest: “Ardbeg Rollercoaster” – a 2010 release issued to mark the Ardbeg Committee's 10th anniversary, vatting ten different cask types from vintages 1997 through 2006 at 57.3% ABV

The second, even more whisky-shaped chapter to Hwasim’s story began in October 2024, when Sumin released the first cask-aged expression: Miraon Very Young. The name is, by his own admission a direct homage to his favourite Islay producer. After Ardbeg was revived by The Glenmoranige Company in 1997, the distillery's first post-revival distillate – all from 1998 – would not reach a standard 10-year maturity until 2008. Rather than wait in silence, Ardbeg released four staged bottlings tracking that single vintage through its first decade in cask: Very Young, Still Young, Almost There, and Renaissance The distillery was tentatively tracking its new post-revival distillate through its first decade of maturation.

Sumin’s Miraon (a portmanteau of “rice” and “joy”) series looks to mirror this arc, year by year, with rice spirit. Miraon Very Young is a 40% rice spirit, double-distilled, then aged for one year in Heaven Hill bourbon casks and bottled at 58.3% ABV at cask strength. Domestically, it is taxed and labelled as craft soju, but as far as someone familiar with Scotch whisky is concerned, this is essentially a single grain whisky.

The line has continued with Miraon Still Young at 56.2% ABV from a two-year aging in Korea’s Original Beer Company’s Moonlight Scotch Ale cask.

In parallel, Hwasim has been releasing a small series of sweet-potato cask experiments: a bourbon-cask-finished sweet potato soju matured for six months; a sherry-finished sweet-potato soju; and several batch-numbered single-cask Miraons. Sumin is incredibly ambitious about his long-term plans: he hopes to convert the entire business to oak-aged production and one day establish a peated rice whisky distillery on Islay itself.

It is worth noting Hwasim Jujo’s two impulses in tension. On one hand, Hwasim's standard rice and the sweet potato sojus are genuinely intriguing as soju. They are pot-distilled rice and sweet-potato spirits, sold legally as Korean distilled soju, that achieve a smoky, savoury, food-friendly profile from a roasting technique applied to the grain or tuber rather than from peated malt, and is perhaps one of the most unique producers in the premium craft-soju conversation. On the other hand, the Miraon and the oak-aged soju lines are functionally Korean single grain whisky in soju’s regulatory clothing. So to describe Hwasim as merely a soju maker is to miss the cask for the warehouse; to call it a whisky maker seems to downplay the quality and popularity of its core flagship!

What category of producer is Hwasim Jujo? Perhaps we will only know in a few years. For now, what is in the glasses before me are two very characterful 40% rice and sweet potato sojus, made by a man in pursuit of a Korean answer to a Hebridean question. The bartender community in Seoul, London and Singapore has already decided he is worth watching. The unanswered question is whether the rest of us spirits lovers will catch up before demand for his whisky outgrows his cask warehouse capacity. The Heart of Fire, in other words, is still burning very young.

We had the opportunity to taste two of these incredible sojus at Odem Singapore. Hwasim Jujo's products are also available in Singapore from its appointed distributor Sool Cellar.

Soju Review: Hwasim Soju Roasted Rice Soju (군쌀) 40% ABV

Tasting Notes

Nose: Rice Krispies right out of the gate – tons of those puffed-cereal, lightly malted sweetness – before deepening into something earthier and toastier, a roasted-grain nuttiness with a whisper of almond, a roasted black sesame quality the longer it sits. Undergirding it is a certain fruitiness – some ripe pear, a faint dried-floral note of white flowers that have been gently smoked. It’s clean and somewhat decadent at once with top notes of playful ricey sweetness and a grounding toasted nutty depth.

Palate: Sweet toasted rice and warm grain once again, now unfolding into scorched rice crust in a claypot (also known as guo ba (锅巴)) with a medium-rich and rounded body and a lovely oily texture of extra virgin olive oil that coats the tongue. Soft bruised apples, mintiness threading through the middle, and then an evocative meaty, gasoline-edged tone straight out of the Springbank/Craigellachie playbook, a kind of savoury petrol-and-grist character that you almost never meet in Asian spirits. Some layers of grass and nuttiness behind it, with some faint shitake mushrooms and earth.

Finish: Surprisingly tidy after a rich palate. It’s clean, crisp and slightly mineral, drying out neatly with a lightly savoury zesty tail.

My Thoughts:

Really impressive, distinctive stuff that takes me back to my childhood. For me it opens on Rice Krispies and I’d have thought I’ve gotten it pegged as a basic sweet, cereal-led pour – and then the deeper smoked nuttiness creeps in to give me that complex scorched-rice crust at the bottom of a claypot flavour.

Knowing how it's made, that makes total sense: the rice is roasted whole and unpolished so the toasted, smoky aromatics stay vivid. Yet the smoke here is quite subtle for me — it's a savoury-floral smokiness, dried petals over embers rather than a bonfire. There's a real mellowness to this spirit too. It is genuinely quite anything else in the Asian spirits category.

Soju Review: Soju Roasted Sweet Potato (군고구마) 40% ABV

Tasting Notes

Nose: Mellow and caramelised first – soft roasted-sweet-potato sweetness with a touch of toffee before turning surprisingly floral and perfumed. Opens with light pink florals lifting out of the glass: sakura, violets, a brush of lavender accompanied by gentle herbaceousness that balances out the sweetness. A really perfumed, herbacious nose.

Palate: Quite layered and slightly textural than the Roasted Rice. The caramelised sweet-potato character here is gentle and clean, lightly sweet with a touch of barley-sugar brightness and that floral lift carrying through from the nose. There's a faint mineral saline crispness and a clean, almost white tea-like purity.

Finish: Clean and lightly mineral, drying gently with orchard fruit and white and pink florals lingering.

My Thoughts:

Where the Roasted Rice goes savoury and scorched, the Roasted Sweet Potato goes high and floral. Really floral, really evocative on the nose, and that generous oily texture is the kicker when paired with these mellower tones.

It does remind me a little of a Japanese imo (sweet potato) shochu, but where imo shochu often leans earthier and funkier, this is pushed in a far more floral, perfumed and caramelised direction – sakura, violets and toffee, which seems to track with how it’s made from sweet potatoes roasted skin-on. This is the more immediately seductive of the two, even if the rice is much more playful and decadent in my impression.

@CharsiuCharlie