The smell of frying bindaetteok greets you before you see anything at Gwangjang Market — thick, oily, golden, the smell of mung bean batter hitting hot cast iron. You follow it instinctively. At Bak-ga-ne, one of Gwangjang's most established stalls, the table was already full before the evening properly started: bindaetteok fresh off the griddle, the stall's signature samhap of bindaetteok with braised pork head meat and brined oysters, mayak kimbap, tteokbokki, nakji tangnangi with yukhoe, and more. And then Prof. Junghoon Moon set his backpack down, opened it, and began producing makgeolli bottles, one after another, until eighteen of them stood in a row on the table.
The guests who had spent the day moving through Seoul's markets looked at the bottles, then at the food, then at each other. The cheer that followed is the specific kind that happens when an evening takes an unexpected and very welcome turn.
This is what the Kim'C Market Culinary Odyssey is designed for: not a tour you watch, but one you learn from. Prof. Moon holds a position at Seoul National University's Department of Agricultural Economics and Rural Sociology, where he runs the Food Business Lab. Beyond academia, he's built a following across YouTube, television, and podcasts as one of Korea's most entertaining food communicators — someone who brings systematic rigor to the question of what tastes good and why. The informal Korean honor for someone with both an exceptional palate and the ability to explain what they're tasting is matjalal — roughly, "one who truly knows taste." He's earned it. Ryan Kim, Kim'C Market's founder and a longtime friend, brought him in as the evening's guide. Prof. Moon arrived at Bak-ga-ne knowing each of those eighteen bottles by name, story, and what they'd taste like poured into a glass.
An evening like this doesn't happen by arrangement. It happens because of trust built over years — the kind that turns a phone call into an education and a table at Gwangjang into something you couldn't find on your own.
A Drink That's Still Working
Makgeolli — the word means roughly "roughly strained" — is Korea's oldest surviving alcoholic beverage, and possibly its most misunderstood. The production method is straightforward on paper: steam rice, cool it, combine with nuruk (a fermentation starter cake made from wheat or barley that carries wild yeasts and bacteria), add water, and ferment at room temperature for one to two weeks. Strain out the solids. What remains is milky, slightly viscous, tangy and subtly sweet, with a soft natural carbonation produced by the yeast still active inside the bottle.
That last part is the essential fact. Most commercially sold makgeolli in Korea is saeng — unpasteurized. The yeast hasn't been killed. The fermentation hasn't stopped. Which means makgeolli has a shelf life of days to weeks rather than months, needs to stay cold, and tastes different from one batch to the next in ways that can't be fully controlled. Compared to sake, which undergoes filtration and double pasteurization to achieve clarity and shelf stability, makgeolli is deliberately unrefined — the rice solids settle at the bottom of the bottle, and you swirl before pouring, or you don't. Drinking first from the clear, lighter layer at the top, then from the mixed, sediment-rich pour that follows, is one of the classic ways to experience the range within a single bottle.
Nuruk functions the way terroir does in wine: it carries the specific wild microorganisms of the place and season it was made, and what those organisms do to the rice and water is what makes one brewery's makgeolli taste entirely different from another's. Two producers using different nuruk will make fundamentally different drinks from the same rice and water. Eighteen bottles on a table can tell eighteen distinct stories.
The Four You Already Know
The evening opened with the four bottles that appear in every Korean supermarket, every pojangmacha, every table with enough people gathered around it: Jipyeong Saeng Makgeolli from Yangpyeong, Gyeonggi Province (its original 1925 brewery building is now a registered national cultural heritage site); Guksoondang Saeng Makgeolli, bright and clean, with a pronounced fruitiness and sharp carbonation; Jangsu Makgeolli, Seoul's ubiquitous house pour, mild and yogurt-like, the baseline most Koreans use to measure everything else; and Neurin Maeul Makgeolli, made by fermenting finely ground uncooked rice dissolved in cold water rather than the standard steamed-grain method, its sweetness coming entirely from higher rice content with no artificial additives.
The group moved through these with bindaetteok in hand — tasting, pausing, writing things down, reaching for another piece of pancake between sips. Jipyeong is rounded and smooth, fermented slowly at low temperature; Guksoondang is bright, fizzy, refreshing; Jangsu is balanced and reliable; Neurin Maeul is the one that makes new drinkers wonder if the others have been cutting corners on rice.
To understand why even the most ordinary makgeolli carries historical weight, a piece of context helps. In 1965, the Park Chung-hee government banned the use of rice in alcohol production under the Grain Management Act — a response to chronic food shortages. Makgeolli, a drink made from rice for centuries, was reformulated with wheat flour. The ban held for twelve years, until 1977, when Korea achieved rice self-sufficiency for the first time. The return of rice makgeolli was one of that year's ten most significant national news events. Across two decades, an entire generation grew accustomed to wheat-based makgeolli. The rice version they rediscovered tasted different from the one their parents remembered. The four bottles at the start of the evening are where the category stood after that long detour — rebuilt, refined, and now sold by the millions.
The Ones That Arrive With an Opinion
Prof. Moon reached for Boksoondoga Sonmakgeolli, and in a brief moment of distraction, shook it. What followed was several minutes of careful pressure management: lid fractionally opened, closed again, opened, closed, repeated across a full ten rounds. Boksoondoga is the bottle you do not shake. The natural carbonation — produced through traditional jar fermentation, not injection — is powerful enough to push the settled solids upward on its own when the bottle opens. The drama of that opening served as its own introduction. When it finally poured clean into wine glasses, the room had been paying attention for several minutes: sharp citrus sourness, high body, a long sweet rice finish, carbonation you feel before you taste. The nickname — Korea's champagne makgeolli — is not a marketing phrase but a technically accurate description. The carbonation, like Champagne's, is a byproduct of ongoing fermentation in the bottle. Reactions around the table were uniform: this was something else.
The bottle that followed carried a different kind of weight. Geumjeongsan Makgeolli from Busan is the deepest irony of the ban era: a brewery that couldn't bring itself to reformulate, it spent those twelve years operating as an illegal still — because its nuruk is foot-trodden, pressed by hand and weight in the old method, and the wild fermentation that results is too singular to approximate any other way. Park Chung-hee had encountered the makgeolli while stationed in Busan as a military commander, and years later, when he learned the brewery was subject to enforcement, issued a presidential order that legalized it. In 1979, Geumjeongsan became Korea's first officially designated folk liquor. It survived the era that nearly erased it because one person with the right authority happened to taste it and couldn't let it go.
You understand why, eventually. It smells sour before you open it, and more sour once you do — the nuruk announcing itself before anything else. It's bitter, sharply acidic, funky in the way that only foot-trodden fermentation produces. There is nothing accommodating about it. Among the guests, reactions divided cleanly in half. One person kept going back for more. This is the makgeolli that takes three sips to understand — and then becomes either a conviction or a firm refusal.
Rich by Design
The next set of bottles shared a common intent: more rice, more depth, more of everything. Where the first tier was about accessibility, these were about commitment — higher alcohol, denser texture, concentrated flavor. The makers behind them aren't trying to broaden the audience for makgeolli. They're pushing further into what it can be.
Naru Saeng Makgeolli and Naru 11 come from the same Seongsu-dong brewery, made with Seoul-grown rice, and illustrate what happens when you keep turning up one variable. Naru Saeng, already using two to three times the standard rice content with no artificial sweeteners, tastes clean and nutty — the way Koreans describe Achim Haessal, the traditional morning rice drink, something pure and nourishing. Naru 11 takes that same logic to 11.5% ABV: thick, creamy, dense, the natural sweetness entirely self-supporting. If makgeolli has a dessert wine equivalent, this is the argument for it.
Dam-eun White and Dam-eun Classic work the same contrast from the other direction. The White, at 6.5%, is light and fresh, built on the clean spring water of Pocheon — the glass that relieves palate fatigue after everything that came before. The Classic, aged five months rather than the standard week or two, is its opposite: rice sweetness compressed into depth, the texture dense and creamy from higher rice density and less water. Poured side by side, they read as a before-and-after of what time does to the same ingredients.
Red Monkey stopped the table visually before anyone tasted it — the makgeolli was a deep, saturated crimson, achieved without food coloring. The color comes from hongkuk rice, grains inoculated with a red mold that dyes the grain a natural scarlet. The taste contradicts the color entirely: not fruity, not berry, but clean nutty grain sweetness. Pasteurized for shelf stability, it carries almost no carbonation; the experience is purely textural, smooth and creamy throughout. Samyangchun closes the group quietly — brewed three times, each batch layered onto the previous, building to 12.5% ABV with a subtle orchard-fruit quality that arrives as a suggestion rather than a statement.
The New Guard
Something is happening in Korean makgeolli that didn't exist a decade ago. A younger generation of brewers has started treating makgeolli as a creative medium — not just something you ferment and bottle, but something you design. The results show up on social media before they show up in bars: beautiful labels, unexpected ingredients, flavors that have no precedent in the traditional category. The question they're asking isn't "how do we make a better makgeolli" but "how far can we push what makgeolli is allowed to be" — and the answer, it turns out, is quite far.
Before he revealed what was in each bottle, Prof. Moon issued a challenge: taste first, then guess the ingredients. No hints. The results ranged from surprisingly accurate to completely off — and the gap between expectation and reality turned out to be the whole point.
Nerd Basil Sparkling was the warm-up: the herbaceous note was sharp enough that most people landed on "something green, something fresh" before the word basil arrived. The makgeolli's sweetness provided the base; a clean, bright basil finish provided the close. Light, precise, arresting.
The Gohung Yuzu edition needed no guessing at all. Named for the South Jeolla region that produces the majority of Korea's yuzu crop, it crossed the boundary between drink and ambient fragrance the moment it was poured — citrus peel and white flowers filling the space before a single sip. At 9.4%, the balance of yuzu brightness, rice sweetness, and the pleasant bitterness of the rind made it the most immediately crowd-pleasing bottle on the table. The one that converts people who thought they didn't like makgeolli.
C Makgeolli's Signature Cuvée, with its juniper berries and raisins, produced a longer pause. Bitter, aromatic, with a trailing pear note and a wine-like structure at 12% — most guesses involved wine, or gin, or something aged. Nobody guessed makgeolli first. Its sibling Bbumak landed more intuitively: generous pear juice and Yangpyeong Chandream rice, lighter and yielding, the kind of bottle you open without warning at a dinner party.
And then Seoul Hyomobang. Prof. Moon set down Rich & Creamy and Deep & Dark without saying a word about either. The room leaned in. Rich & Creamy — vanilla bean, egg, milk, cream, butter, and oak chips — produced a full minute of concentrated effort: dessert wine, someone said. Crème brûlée, said another. When the actual ingredient list was read out, people compared their notes to confirm they'd heard it right. Deep & Dark — truffle, squid ink, cheongyang pepper, shrimp, coconut — opened with truffle and closed with a long, building heat from the pepper. The shrimp and squid ink prompted skeptical looks that only partially resolved after the second sip. Both are technically classified as "other liquors" under Korean law, because the additions push them past the makgeolli definition. In method and spirit — fermented, rice-based, alive at the center — they are makgeolli. The regulatory category is still catching up.
What You Eat With It
The food at Bak-ga-ne didn't step back to let the makgeolli take the stage. It held its ground.
Owner Choo Sang-mi had set the table with the kind of generosity that makes a meal feel like a gesture. Bindaetteok ground fresh daily from whole mung beans on a millstone — a process that produces texture and richness different from anything made with pre-ground stock — arrived alongside the stall's signature samhap: bindaetteok, braised pork head meat, and brined oysters, eaten together the way the combination was designed to be eaten. Mayak kimbap, tteokbokki, nakji tangnangi, yukhoe. The table was entirely full, and no one complained.
The food and the makgeolli were doing what food and makgeolli exist to do in proximity. The lactic acidity cuts through the bindaetteok's oil. The rice sweetness softens the brine of the oysters. The carbonation resets a palate working through raw beef and fermented seasonings. Prof. Moon noted that the pairing logic extends beyond the table: brined oysters, whose salt and sea carry well against makgeolli's acidity, and rich proteins — pork bossam, a sharp hard cheese — whose weight the rice wine's sweetness is built to balance. The glasses kept being refilled. No one tracked how many times.
What Eighteen Glasses Actually Prove
For most people, makgeolli arrives with a fixed image: a milky white drink, sweet and a little sour, the kind of thing you order at a market stall or pour into a bowl on a rainy afternoon. Approachable, unpretentious, uncomplicated. That image isn't wrong — it's just incomplete.
By the end of the evening, Prof. Moon had made a case without explicitly making it: that the category has grown well beyond that image. Makgeolli today spans from mass-produced staples to five-month-aged expressions that sit in the register of late-harvest wines, from bottles that require ten careful openings to ones that turn red from a naturally pigmented grain. The logic behind all of it — small producers, living ferments, nuruk that carries the microbial character of a specific place and season — is the same logic that drives natural wine and small-batch spirits. The comparison isn't a stretch. It's just accurate.
None of this makes makgeolli something it isn't. What it does is make the word "simple" feel inadequate. Across eighteen glasses, at a table covered in mung bean pancakes and raw beef and brined oysters, in a market that has been doing this for over a hundred years, the point arrived quietly and stayed.
From Gwangjang, the Odyssey continued south. The next day would take the group to Namyangju — and to the kitchen of a woman who has spent a lifetime mastering the art of kimchi.
About Bak-ga-ne
FAQ
What is nuruk, and why does it matter so much to makgeolli?
Nuruk is a fermentation starter made from wheat or barley, inoculated with wild yeasts, molds, and bacteria, and dried into a cake. It's what initiates fermentation in makgeolli and the primary factor behind each brewery's distinct character. Unlike the highly purified commercial yeasts used in industrial brewing, nuruk carries a diverse community of microorganisms that produces more complex, variable flavor. Breweries that make their own nuruk by hand — the way Boksoondoga does — treat it as the foundation of what makes their makgeolli different from anyone else's.
How is makgeolli different from soju?
Soju and makgeolli come from entirely different production philosophies. Soju is a distilled spirit — clear, neutral, and high in alcohol (typically 16–25%), designed to accompany food without competing with it. Makgeolli is a fermented, unfiltered rice wine — lower in alcohol (usually 5–12%, though craft expressions run higher), milky, tangy, and full of the flavors of the rice and nuruk used to make it. Where soju tends to disappear into a meal, makgeolli is the conversation itself: something you taste, discuss, and compare. Both are deeply embedded in Korean drinking culture, but the experience of drinking them is as different as beer is from whiskey.
Is makgeolli gluten-free?
Traditional nuruk is made from wheat or barley, so most makgeolli is not gluten-free. Some breweries use rice-based fermentation starters, but this is the exception rather than the rule. If gluten is a concern, it's worth confirming with the specific producer.
How do you drink makgeolli?
You can swirl the bottle before pouring to mix the settled solids throughout, or pour without swirling and drink in two stages — the lighter, clearer layer first, then swirl and pour again for the denser, richer layer. Both approaches reveal something different in the same bottle. Drink it cold and drink it fresh; makgeolli degrades noticeably over its shelf life, and there's no recovering the first few days.
Where can I find premium makgeolli outside Korea?
A handful of producers — Boksoondoga among them — are available through Korean specialty stores and select online retailers in major US cities. The challenge is that the best makgeolli is unpasteurized, which limits how far it travels well; most of what reaches foreign markets has been pasteurized for shelf stability, which changes the experience significantly. Some things are worth going to the source for.