Sul: Korea's Traditional Liquors

Sul (술) is the Korean word for alcoholic drink, and for most of Korean history it meant something brewed at home from grain. Liquor was part of ancestral rites, village festivals, farm work and hospitality, and a well-run household was expected to brew well: in the seventeenth-century Eumsik dimibang, more than a third of the entries are about brewing (see Joseon cookbooks). This article describes those drinks as food culture; it takes no position on drinking itself.

Nuruk: the starter

Korean brewing depends on nuruk (누룩), a fermentation starter made by moistening crushed wheat or other grains, pressing it into cakes and letting molds and wild yeasts grow on it for anywhere from a week to more than forty days. The molds convert grain starch to sugar and the yeasts turn sugar into alcohol, so a single crock does both jobs at once. The first explicit record of nuruk in Korea is in the Goryeo dogyeong, the 1123 account by the Song envoy Xu Jing, though references to liquor in the Three Kingdoms histories suggest starters were in use much earlier. Detailed recipes appear in Joseon texts, which list wheat, rice, mung beans and barley as starter grains.

Since the 1960s, many commercial breweries have used a cultured, Japanese-style rice koji (ipguk) instead of traditional wheat nuruk, one of several modern shifts in how Korean liquor tastes.

Makgeolli: the cloudy everyday drink

Makgeolli (막걸리) is a milky, lightly sparkling rice liquor made by straining the whole fermented mash rather than drawing off the clear liquid on top. The name is usually explained as "roughly strained" or "just strained." Xu Jing observed in 1123 that ordinary people, unable to get the fine wine of the royal brewery, drank something thin in flavor and dark in color, which is often read as an early glimpse of this kind of drink. As a named recipe, an early form appears as hondonju, "chaotic liquor," in the Joseon brewing manual Yangjubang.

Makgeolli was the farmer's drink, carried to the fields at rice-planting time, and the liquor of village rites. Today it is typically 6 to 8 percent alcohol, with lighter and stronger craft versions; unpasteurized saeng makgeolli is sold with live yeast and lactic acid bacteria. Makgeolli brewing was designated a National Intangible Cultural Heritage of Korea in 2021.

Cheongju and yakju: the clear liquors

Leaving the mash to settle and drawing off the clear liquid gives cheongju (청주), clear liquor, the more refined drink of the yangban table and ancestral rites. In Joseon it was often brewed in two stages, with a base of nonglutinous rice and a second addition of steamed glutinous rice. The polite word yakju (약주), "medicinal liquor," came to mean fine clear liquor in general. One explanation holds that the privileged drank clear liquor as "medicine" during famine-year prohibitions; another traces the name to a celebrated liquor brewed at the Seoul home of the official Seo Seong. Under colonial rule, Japanese-style sake was labeled cheongju while Korean clear liquor was grouped under yakju, and that legal distinction persists.

Soju: the distilled spirit

Distilled soju (소주) arrived later. Distillation is thought to have spread from the Middle East through the Mongol Yuan empire, and most Korean accounts date soju's arrival to the reign of the Goryeo king Chungnyeol (r. 1274–1308), when Mongol forces were stationed on the peninsula. Places associated with Mongol garrisons, among them Andong, Gaeseong and Jeju, became known for it. Spirits were distilled from fermented mash in a stacked still called a sojutgori. In Joseon, officials repeatedly complained that soju drinking was spreading from medicine and the elite into ordinary banquets and wasting rice.

Most soju sold today is a different product: diluted, sweetened neutral spirit, the result of mid-1960s rules that barred grain from distilling and brewing during rice shortages. Traditional distilled soju has since been revived by regional producers.

Sul at the table

Korean drinks have always been served with food, and the snacks that go with them, anju, overlap heavily with banchan. A makgeolli-heritage entry in the Encyclopedia of Korean Culture describes the drink as a kind of liquid rice, which is why everyday rice side dishes double so easily as drinking food; its writer names well-fermented, sour kimchi as the classic match. Kimchi jeon, haemul pajeon, dubu kimchi and mung-bean pancakes are standard partners for makgeolli, and pairing makgeolli with jeon on rainy days is a widely repeated custom; Korean convenience-store chains have reported makgeolli sales rising during rainy spells (see anju and drinking culture).

Suppression and revival

Modern history was hard on home brewing. Liquor-tax rules under colonial rule culminated in a 1935 tightening that effectively ended household brewing, and from the mid-1960s rice was barred from makgeolli in favor of imported wheat and corn. Brewing liquor at home for personal use became legal again in 1995, and the rice-based makgeolli and small-brewery revival of recent decades has brought many old regional styles back into production.