Homemade Apple-Ginger Makgeolli

Wednesday, July 31, 2013

On our last day of summer vacation we got together with Tyler to try to make our own makgeolli. Tyler had watched some of his co-workers make it once, but Bobby and I had never tried to make it. We did a little research that morning, but we weren't exactly sure how to make makegeolli. We decided to just jump right in and try. Here is how we did it: 

4:00 pm: Started cooking 10 kgs. of white sticky rice in our two small rice cookers. We read online that you are suppose to only cook the rice 80% of the way. But we failed and cooked it all the way.. and added way too much water. The rice turned out to be one sticky mess.

5:00 pm: Once all the rice was ready we put it into every small container I could find in our apartment in an effort to cool it.

9:00 pm: We cut up four apples and 5 or 6 knobs of ginger and added it to our fermenter. Then, we added the rice gunk and water into the apple/ginger mix and pitched our yeast.

We waited three days, mixing it everyday with our hands.

Sunday, August 4, 2013

Finally, it was time to bottle! Bobby and I stood together in our small shower stall while he picked up the jug and I held some mesh bags. We filled the bags with the rice, apple, and ginger mixture. When the bags got full we squeezed as much liquid as we could from it, threw the bags in the sink and then started over again. By the time we dumped all the liquid out, our hands were sticky and we had rice in between our toes from some spills we had-it was fun!

We used 10 lbs of rice, but after the makgeolli was finished fermenting we were left with only one large ziplock of rice.

Here's the final product. 

Monday, August 5th , 2013

Today we brought some of our Ginger Apple Makgeolli to work for the Korean's to try. They were shocked that we could make makgeolli at home and were very impressed by the taste. They kept yelling "masheesayo!"-delicious!

We are extremely proud of this first batch of makgeolli. Yes we made a few mistakes, but it seemed to work out well for us in the end.

We are currently brewing beer, hard cider, and kombucha, all of which are very good. However, I think this makgeolli might be better than everything else!

It's always fun to try out new recipes, especially when they turn out so well!

So how about you try something new in the near future, who knows, it might be the best thing you have ever had!

Cheers,

Jestine and Bobby