LA Times
By Sonja Swanson
MAY 1, 2019
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 white makgeolli at the same places.
But, 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.” It harks back to an era when brewing was a resource-intensive luxury: If your village had good alcohol, it was a pretty good sign of peace and plenty.
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 makgeolli, a 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.
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