My First Makgeolli Experiment - Day 1

This isn't even remotely baking, but it does involve yeast, so maybe it's relevant enough anyway. I really like makgeolli, but it's really expensive to buy in the UK. But it also looks really easy to brew a basic makgeolli, as long as you can get hold of nuruk - which was where the snag was for quite a long time. But eventually, I discovered that there is a single brand of nuruk that is imported into the UK by HMart (and this is the only brand and only supplier I've managed to find after quite extensive searching). Unhelpfully, it's not labelled as "nuruk" but rather Choripdong Enzyme Powder, which explains why I had such a hard time finding it. But now that I've found it, I've bought some together with a couple of kilos of sweet rice (chapssal), and it's time to try making my first makgeolli! I'm following the basic recipe in the Primer on Brewing Makgeolli produced by the Korean government, but I've been surprised to discover that pretty much all of the basic starter danyangju recipes that I've seen agree incredibly closely on the ratio of about 1:1:0.1 for rice:water:nuruk.

First Makgeolli

Ingredients

• 750g Sweet rice (chapssal)
• 750ml Water
• 70g Nuruk

Method

1. Wash the rice until the water runs clear.
2. Soak the rice for 2-6 hours.
3. Drain the rice well.
4. Steam the rice in a steamer lined with damp cheesecloth for 40 minutes.
5. Remove the rice from the steamer and spread out to cool until it reaches ~25C.
6. Put the cooled mixed rice in the fermentation jar with the water and nuruk, and mix thoroughly until the rice absorbs all of the water.
7. Wipe down the insides of the jar, and cover loosely with the lid. I used a paper towel underneath the jar lid with the rubber gasket removed.
8. Leave in a warm place (ideally ~20-25C) to ferment.
9. Stir thoroughly every 12 hours for the first 48 hours, wiping down the sides of the jar after each stir.
10. Leave to ferment for a total of ~7-10 days.
11. Once fermentation is complete, stir the mixture together and filter through cheesecloth.
12. Bottle the liquid and store refrigerated. Mix and dilute with water to drink.

Lots of the blogs I read and videos I watched really emphasised washing the rice until the water ran completely clear. I washed the rice continuously for around 15 minutes and the water still wasn't completely clear, so I gave up and decided that was good enough. I can't see it making any tangible difference given how washed the rice was - but at least all of our houseplants got well watered!

This is the rice just before steaming - it turns out that 750g is quite a lot of rice!

This is how it looks at the end of step 7. It's taken a surprisingly long time in total - I started washing rice a little before 11am this morning, and it was 6pm by the time it reached this stage. Admittedly, the first 5 hours was essentially just letting the rice soak, but it still feels like it's been a long process!