The practical English-language makgeolli brewing reference.
Makgeolli 막걸리 is Korea’s oldest alcoholic drink: steamed rice, water and nuruk, fermented into something cloudy, lightly fizzy and alive. This is a field guide to brewing it — precise, sourced, and honest about what it does not know.
The correction that matters most
“Use 10–20% nuruk, about 15%” is a cake-nuruk-only figure. Nuruk is dosed by saccharifying power, not weight: cake nuruk runs about 300 SP and doses at 10% of total rice; powdered runs about 1,200 SP and doses at 2.3%. Someone reading 15% while holding powdered nuruk uses about 6.5× what the batch needs.
In the guide
- How much nuruk do I use?It depends which nuruk you have. Cake needs ~10% of the rice weight; powdered needs ~2.3%. Getting it wrong is the commonest way a first batch is ruined.
- Your first batch: a danyangjuA single-stage makgeolli: 1 kg of rice, 100 g of cake nuruk, 1.2 L of water. An hour's work, then a week of watching. Every number explained, not handed down.