(Source: Johnny Kyunghwo Sheldrick / @johnnykyunghwo)

Before 20th-century liquor licensing and commercial consolidation, Korean brewing was deeply domestic. Nearly every household made its own rice wine. The work fell, by long convention, to the women of the family, who were expected to learn by watching and listening to older women rather than by reading anything written down. Some of what they learned was practical, some bordered on superstition, and most of it sat somewhere in between. “Do not keep alcohol and vinegar under the same roof” is the example Korean brewers tend to give now, a rule that predates germ theory by a long way but turns out, when you understand acetic acid bacteria, to be entirely sound. The muscle memory of brewing ran through entire generations.

"Tavern" by Kim Hong-do from the permanent collection at the National Museum of Korea, depicts a jumak, a wine tavern frequented by commoners. Such taverns were where early iterations of Korean rice were enjoyed.

That tradition broke twice. The first break was the Japanese colonial liquor tax, which from 1909 onwards taxed home-made gayangju and made home brewing effectively illegal. The second break came later, after liberation, when faced with chronic rice shortages in 1965, the Korean government banned the use of rice in alcohol brewing entirely. This ban on brewing with rice was not lifted until 1991, and home brewing was not properly legal again until the early 2000s. By that point, the chain of grandmothers teaching granddaughters had been broken for the best part of a century. The recipes had not so much been lost as quietly mothballed inside surviving family memory, occasionally retrieved by craft brewers willing to do the archival digging.

The craft makgeolli that drinks lovers have been able to experience in recent years is, in that sense, a stranger thing than the bottle on the bar makes it look. The modern craft makgeolli revival gathered pace from the late 2000s and accelerated through the 2010s as small-scale brewing regulations eased. What we now see is the polished, professional surface of a tradition that nearly died as a domestic practice.

Last month, we had the opportunity to sit in for Johnny Kyunghwo’s “Alt Makgeolli” making workshop at the Korean Craft Collective event. The two-day event was organised by Sool Cellar, the Singapore importer that brings in more than forty labels of craft makgeolli direct from small Korean breweries. The people behind Sool Cellar have been doing the patient work of building a Korean craft-drinks audience in Singapore over the past couple of years, importing bottles and explaining to first-time drinkers why a slightly cloudy rice wine can taste like yoghurt without containing any.

When the Korean Craft Collective took over New Bahru's School Hall, most of what filled the floor was that fidelity-first version of the tradition. Small-batch brewers using traditional nuruk, regional rice and low-intervention methods. But the most popular workshop on the schedule was Johnny Kyunghwo's.

(Source: Johnny Kyunghwo Sheldrick / @johnnykyunghwo)

Johnny was teaching us how to brew an “Alt Makgeolli”. While the other presenters on the floor were brewery or distillery representatives talking about their product, this workshop was about how you, too, can make a very respectable bottle of makgeolli right at home with ingredients you could easily source locally. Johnny himself, in a TikTok he had posted months earlier to prove the recipe worked, briefly explained the principle behind his Alt Makgeolli recipe.

The British-Korean fermentation creator first began making fermentation-related videos in 2020 because he could not find a kimchi he liked in England. He lives now somewhere in the south of Korea, where he keeps a rotation of fermenters going across sourdough, ginger bug sodas, soy sauces, and a near-permanent makgeolli project he describes as a phase he cycles back into every few months. He is a self-taught home brewer with an outsized audience and several years of trial-and-error behind him on solving a specific problem that occurs to anyone who tries to make Korean rice wine outside Korea, which is that nuruk (the wild, wheat-based fermentation starter that Korean rice wine has relied on for centuries) is genuinely hard to get hold of.

The first thing he made very clear at the start of the workshop, once the kit was laid out, was the ingredient ratio:

• One part dry rice (500 grams)
• One part water (500 ml)
• Ten per cent of water weight in koji (50 grams)
• A teaspoon of wine yeast
• One probiotic pill (containing Lactobacillus species).

Hold the ratio steady and you can scale it up to any batch size you want without ending up with twenty litres of makgeolli sitting around in your kitchen.

On the night before brewing day, the rice is first washed gently. The trick, Johnny says, is not to break the grains. You don't scrub. You don't squeeze hard. You just rotate the rice through the water with one hand. After five to ten rinses, the rice is covered in fresh water and soaked overnight. Johnny was emphatic about the overnight soak. While some recipes might tell you to soak for two hours, Johnny recommends overnight soaking to ensure that the rice is fully saturated with water and would steam evenly the next day.

The next morning, the rice goes into a sieve and is left to drain for the better part of an hour. Every few minutes, the sieve gets a small shake. There is more water trapped in the grains than you would think; the shaking dislodges it.

(Source: Johnny Kyunghwo Sheldrick / @johnnykyunghwo)

Then the rice steams. 500 grams of rice is a fairly small batch, so fifteen or twenty minutes was enough. For larger batches at home, Johnny tends to run his steamer for closer to forty. The texture you are aiming for is firm and chewy, with a slight sheen on every grain and no matte white left anywhere. He also prefers regular rice rather than the glutinous rice that older Korean recipes specify, partly because regular rice is cheaper, partly because, in the koji-based versions he has been making for a couple of years, he simply prefers how it tastes.

Once cooked, the steamed rice gets tipped onto a tray and spread thin to cool. An electric fan will cut the cooling time dramatically. The reason for the cooling is that the next set of ingredients you add are live cultures that may not survive contact with hot rice.

When the rice has cooled to roughly room temperature, everything goes into a large mixing bowl together: the steamed rice, the koji, the water, the cracked-open probiotic pill (capsule discarded, powder tipped in), and the teaspoon of wine yeast. The bowl is where the mixing happens.

(Source: Johnny Kyunghwo Sheldrick / @johnnykyunghwo)

To understand the principle behind Johnny’s recipe – which does not involve the use of nuruk –it helps to know what nuruk does in a traditional brew. Nuruk is the original Korean fermentation starter, traditionally made by binding crushed wheat or barley into a thick disc and leaving it to ferment in a warm space for a few weeks, allowing whatever wild microbes happen to be in the air to colonise it. The result is a dense, dry brick packed with three different kinds of microbial life.

There are filamentous moulds, including Aspergillus oryzae but often also A. kawachii and A. luchuensis, which produce the amylase enzymes that “saccharify” rice starch into fermentable sugars. There are wild yeast strains within the nuruk – such as Saccharomyces cerevisiae, Wickerhamomyces anomalus and Saccharomycopsis fibuligera – which convert sugars into alcohol. Finally, nuruk also contains lactic acid bacteria, including lactobacilli, which contribute to makgeolli’s yoghurt-like acidity. These microbes give makgeolli a distinctive yoghurt-like tang that distinguishes it from other forms of Asian rice wines (where lactic fermentation is less central).

Johnny's recipe takes those three functions apart and gives each one to something much easier to source.

Koji is added to steamed rice to handle the first job, which is converting rice starch into rice sugar. Now, while koji is inoculated with A. oryzae, it does not involve any yeasts or lactobacilli that nuruk carries.

Therefore it’s necessary to add a teaspoon of wine yeast to handle the alcoholic fermentation that nuruk's wild yeasts would otherwise have done. The strain Johnny uses, EC1118, is a workhorse wine yeast that any home brewer will recognise from cider and country-wine recipes. It is reliable, alcohol-tolerant, and the kind of thing you can keep a small sachet of in the fridge for a couple of years.

Finally, Johnny Kyunghwo held up a probiotic pill. The kind you might swallow with your morning coffee if your gut needs a nudge. We curiously watched him crack it open, tip a fine white powder into a stainless steel bowl containing a mixture of steamed rice and koji, and use it to start a batch of Korean rice wine. Many probiotic pills contain lactic acid bacteria, including Lactobacillus species, but the label matters. As mentioned, these microbes are what produce the lactic acid you taste on the finish of a makgeolli that pushes the drink closer to makgeolli’s familiar lactic profile rather than a plain koji-and-yeast rice ferment.

These ingredients, he was saying, were going to do roughly the same job as nuruk. That was the entire trick, more or less. A pill from the pharmacy, a bag of koji you can buy from a Japanese supermarket and a sachet of wine yeast, standing in for the wild, wheat-based culture that has anchored Korean rice wine for hundreds of years.

What comes next is a bit of exercise. Johnny began kneading the whole mixture in the bowl together by hand. Korean cooking has a long-standing concept called sonmat (손맛), literally "hand taste", which is a romantic idea that food made with your own hands carries a flavour unique to the person making it – a certain sentimental idea of the warmth and intention of the cook entering the dish. Johnny joked that he is not entirely sure what to make of this traditional interpretation and was reasonably convinced sonmat is just the cook sharing their own microbial flora with the brew.

You would grab a fistful of rice, squeeze it, then open your hand. The rice releases, then sucks the water back into itself like a sponge. The trick is not to break the grains. You want them whole, just plumped and saturated with the koji-infused water around them. He did this for ten or fifteen minutes, almost meditatively, gathering and squeezing in a quiet rhythm.

(Source: Johnny Kyunghwo Sheldrick / @johnnykyunghwo)

Once the mixing is done, the contents of the bowl get poured into the fermenter jar. Then the inside of the fermenter's headspace gets wiped down with a clean cloth so no stray rice sticks to the glass above the water line. The airlock goes on with a finger of water in it. The airlock functions as a one-way valve that lets the carbon dioxide produced by fermentation escape upwards without letting anything ambient back in. If you do not have an airlock on hand, you could instead cover the fermenter jar's opening with a cheesecloth or towel and cover it with a lid. Anything that prevents random fruit flies and airborne yeasts from joining your ferment is, for a home brewer, worth the trouble.

(Source: Johnny Kyunghwo Sheldrick / @johnnykyunghwo)

The whole thing goes into a cool, dark spot, and you leave it overnight.

The next day, you open the fermenter, mix the contents top-to-bottom with a strong spoon, and close it again. You do this two or three times a day for the first two or three days. By the second morning, the rice will already look more porridge-like than the night before. By the third or fourth day, it stops looking like rice in water and starts looking like rice wine. The koji's enzymes are doing the starch-to-sugar work, the wine yeast is turning that sugar into alcohol and CO₂, and the lactobacillus is producing the lactic acid that gives the finished drink its tang.

After those first two or three days of active stirring, you leave it alone for a further five to seven. Five days for a sweeter makgeolli, seven for a drier one. Temperature matters more in this phase than at any other point. Lactobacillus has an ideal temperature of around 36°C, close to the human body's; if your kitchen runs warm, the bacteria sprints ahead and the brew ends up aggressively sour. Wine yeast, by contrast, prefers something cooler and slower, and at lower temperatures it produces a smoother, more complex result. The trade-off is the same one every fermentation hobbyist eventually learns to manage. Johnny recommended somewhere between 20 and 24°C. In Korean winters, he sets his fermenter near a heater. In summers, he sometimes runs an ice box.

(Source: Johnny Kyunghwo Sheldrick / @johnnykyunghwo)

When the seven days are up, the makgeolli gets strained through a cheesecloth. The solids that come out can be saved (Johnny likes baking them into sourdough loaves, which gives the bread a faint rice-wine note). The liquid that comes out can be drunk straight, but is usually watered down to bring the alcohol percentage from the high single digits, where it lands by default, down to somewhere closer to a beer. Then it goes into clean glass pressure-safe bottles or used PET soda bottles, lives in the fridge, and gets burped regularly because the live yeast in the bottle will keep producing gas.

Fresh, Johnny said, is best. This should be consumed within a week or two. The flavour changes if you let it sit longer.

(Source: Johnny Kyunghwo Sheldrick / @johnnykyunghwo)

Johnny had brought us some makgeolli samples made using his Alt Makgeolli recipe: a traditional makgeolli, a coconut flavoured one, a yuja makgeolli – made with Korean yuzu which Johnny sources from his own village, a sweet potato pandan version, and most interestingly, a non-alcoholic version Johnny had made by first holding the rice and koji at 60 degrees Celsius for a day to convert the starch fully into sugar (the same trick that produces Japanese amazake).

I tried the plain one first. The first sip landed exactly where I had hoped. The slightly grainy, almost porridge-like body of a properly unfiltered makgeolli, followed by that signature lactic tang on the finish, the one that sits closer to plain yoghurt than to lemon. Pretty authentic stuff!

From one perspective, Korean brewing tradition, as it originally existed before the 1970s, was not characterised by ingredient purity. It was characterised by participation. Anyone with a pot of rice and a piece of nuruk could make legitimate makgeolli at home. Johnny's recipe removes that one ingredient that has become hardest to keep in your cupboard outside Korea, and replaces it with three things you almost certainly already have access to. Johnny was not pretending the result would be identical to a nuruk-driven brew, although after tasting his brew, I honestly would not know for certain that his Alt Makgeolli was not made with nuruk. He is making it possible for more to participate. And in a way, the spirit of homebrewing great rice wine, than any specific recipe, is the bit of the tradition worth pulling back into circulation.

Johnny’s Alt Makgeolli recipe can be found right on his TikTok proof-of-concept video. Check it out and make your own makgeolli at home!

Kanpai!

88 Bamboo Editorial Team