Moon & Lion Brewing

This was my first attempt at adding fruit into the brewing process. I added 150 g of blueberries to a brew with the following ratio:  500 g rice  1 liter water 50 g nuruk  3 g yeast The goal of this test batch was first and foremost to prove that it could be done. 150 g of frozen blueberries were washed and thawed to room temperature. Then, the berries were added to the brew at the same time as the yeast and hydrated nuruk (sugok). The mixture was mixed by hand for about 30 minutes before being covered and placed in a dark cabinet at 75 degrees F. The pictures are in chronological order.   This batch yielded about 48 ounces of concentrated blueberry makgeolli. Upon tasting it was obvious that this was makgeolli, but the blueberry was not so obvious. Aside from the light pink hue and a gentle aroma, there wasn't a strong indication that this was brewed with blueberries. I'll let it age for a few days in the bottle and

  ...stay tuned.

Last week I was contacted by Matt Rodbard of Food Republic about makgeolli and makgeolli making. He is setting up to put together a book along with Deuki Hong about how Korean food has adapted/changed/evolved in the USA. You can check out a brief blurb about the book, Koreatown, USA on eater.com here . Needless to say, I am excited for the chance to discuss making makgeolli, something I enjoy doing on a regular basis. I offered to give them a taste of what I make. What else is there to do except brew? For this batch I used the ratio found in Making, Drinking, Enjoying Makgeolli but halved the portions.  Measured rice, nuruk, and yeast. Soaking rice, nuruk, and yeast. Cooling the cooked rice. This time I used a damp cheesecloth to assist in moving the rice to the fermentation jar after cooling.  The cooled rice, soaked nuruk, and yeast come together for fermentation...  ...and are stored in the dark. @ the 24 hour mark you can see that the

The Making, Drinking, and Enjoying Makgeolli | Part 1: Understanding Makgeolli | page has been updated with a new section!  Today's update includes the etymology of the Korean word for alcohol, 술.  I started to include footnotes to add clarity to some esoteric concepts or topics. Thankfully, they carried over with the copypasta from MS Word. Unfortunately, they did not paste as functioning hyperlinks. For the time being I'll just leave them as text. I may convert them to working hyperlinks in the future if (I should say when) the document becomes terribly long.  I hope you enjoy the new content ^ ^.  The next few sections will follow the Table of Contents , picking up from the most easily learned brewing fundamentals in the world.