Why I started this
Hi. I used to work at a Korean traditional liquor brewery, handling production and quality control. Which mostly meant chasing down one question over and over: why does the same recipe taste different every time?
That question is the whole reason this site exists.
Korean rice wine — makgeolli, and everything beyond it — is strange in the best way. The basics are almost embarrassingly simple: rice, water, and a fermentation starter. You could start tonight with what’s probably already in your kitchen. But the moment you actually do it, you realize how alive it is. The same steps give you a different drink depending on your room temperature, your water, how you washed the rice, the mood of the microbes that day. Simple to begin, impossible to fully master. That’s exactly what makes it worth doing.
Beer, wine, sake — if you want to brew them at home in English, there’s a whole world waiting for you. Guides, communities, forums, suppliers. Korean liquor doesn’t have that yet. There’s growing love for drinking it, but almost nothing for making it. A few scattered blog posts, and that’s about it.
So I want to be the person who fills that gap. To help more people actually try it — to turn “I’ve had makgeolli once” into “I made this myself.”
If that sounds like your kind of thing, stick around. I’ll walk you through it, failures and all.
And when your first batch comes out weird — because it will — send me a photo.