Hello and welcome to Cooking Issues. This is Dave Arnold, your host of Cooking Issues coming to you live from the Heart of Manhattan, Rockefeller Center, New York City. New Stan Studios joined as usual with John. How are you doing, John? Doing great, thanks.
Yeah, everything good? All right. Everything's great. God. Got uh Joe Hazenrock in the panels behind me.
What's up? Oh, busy studio. Welcome. Nice, nice. Uh, upper left, left, Quinn Fuse.
How you doing? Fuchile. What's up? Everything good? All right.
I'm good. Good, good. Yeah. Uh got uh in California, Jackie Molecules. How you doing?
I'm good. It's freezing here for California standards. So what is it? What does that mean, dude? 5345.
Shut up. You need to shut up. And uh uh nice surprise. I didn't think she was gonna be able to make it today. And Nastasia the Hammer Lopez, how you doing?
Okay. Feeling better? Nice, good, good. And uh today's uh special guests in the studio. Studio is completely packed.
So for those of you who don't know, this studio is an old, it's called New Stand Studio because it's an old newsstand, so it's very narrow. The only thing narrower than this place is Bar Contra. That's the only place on earth narrower that people are allowed into. Uh we have uh from uh Hanamakali, uh Alice Jun and John Lim. Am I pronouncing everything correctly?
Yeah, you nailed it. Uh and for those of you that don't know, uh, we're gonna talk a lot about it in a minute, but um I had had Makali before, which is uh, you know, a rice-based uh Korean alcoholic beverage. But when I went to Korea a couple of months ago, I was like, oh my god, oh my god, and I came back and I was like, I need to learn more about people making the United States, and hence they're here to to teach us. But uh before that, uh, what do we got? What do we got going?
Everyone you guys are invited to. What do we got going this week? What happened in the past week that's good? I know Nastasi probably doesn't have anything good because this last week's been a horror show, but aside from that, uh, what do we got? Anyone?
Um well, I mean, this past week has been really interesting. Um, dry January is coming to an end. Oh, okay. And yeah, certainly there is like obviously horrible parts about this week and existential questions that are floating, but it is driving a flock back to the bars and the breweries. Oh, yeah, yeah.
So you really notice a drop in January on the numbers? Drop in January, but this year there's a drop on dry January. So the inverse of it. Um it's been really nice to see. I mean, more people are staying liquored up in January because of the city.
Exactly. The community's coming out. Um there is at least a vibrancy that's coming back to the dining scene in Brooklyn. Um, at least like uh an uptick from 2024 and the end of it. So um we've been having a great start to the year.
Yeah, nice. Nice. Let's see. Do have I done anything. What about you, John?
You got anything from the restaurant? Anything good? I had a really delicious dinner at demo the other night, but that's a restaurant that's right next to mine. Yeah, it's delicious. Chef's Q.
Yeah, Q is good. Why would you sound so sad about how to do that? No, I don't know, because I just would no, I just wish I'd spent more time eating at other restaurants. But um demo is fantastic. Okay.
What Chef Q is doing there is really delicious, had a really delicious tripe dish. And uh his co-chef there, uh Dina is makes some of the best beans I've ever had. Really delicious butter beans with some kale in there, and just really simple and really fantastic. Yeah. Butter beans, huh?
Yeah. And kale? Yeah. Like I I know what it sounds like, but it really was fantastic. What do you mean?
What does it sound like? I don't know. To me, it just sounds a little like plain and boring, but it's just like it's the best. If if I had Steve Sando on speed dial, I would call him and tell him that. John says that butter beans is boring.
No, I love them, but it's just it's I don't know, they're just usually men. She just really makes them pop and they're fantastic. Any bean she has she makes it's great. So yeah. Hey this is not this is not a dried or any kind of bean but you know what I I miss every year?
Wax beans. I love a wax bean. Do you like a wax bean or a green bean? Wax bean. Wax?
Over green bean I think yeah. Yeah. With bacon or without bacon. I mean with bacon. Okay.
Yeah. Yeah naturally what form of green crap? Do you like parsley in that or some other form of green crap or no green crap? Yeah. Yeah.
So basically what I'm feeling is wax bean, bacon, parsley. Answer. That works, yeah yeah. I can eat the heck out of that. Oh my God, I can eat the heck out of that.
All right, what about you, Jack? What do you got? Um I want to shout out Julia Turtion because it's been a super busy week for me and uh her cookbooks, man, that is really some good like you've only got, you know, an hour to slop something together at home. All right, so give me an example. What do you slop together in an hour?
The steak chicken and kimchi rice dish that she does, which is r I mean it's like the simplest thing on earth. It's literally just throwing unchopped kimchi, chopped up any chicken boneless and broth basically and hot. Wait, what's I don't need a cookbook for but what's uh what's any chicken? Like when you say any chicken, I'm like like what's any chicken? You mean like any part of any chicken?
Yeah, yeah. Just any little boneless chopped up, you know, whatever. I see. Yeah all the recipes are just made with with well at least in you know some of her books with with uh busy life in mind and uh it's been working for me. Yeah.
Oh, I'll give you one real quick. Uh you know how, and sorry, apologize. Everyone used the earmuff. This is a a bread thing. But you know, for years, I've years and years, I've been doing uh spent, I've been using, I I keep a starter, but I use spent plus yeast, right?
Because I'm like, I'm not gonna throw away, you know, you know, all of this starter and nobody can make that many pancakes and muffins that they have it used for all of the spent, right? But I've found that I've gotten the recipe down that I can do 100% no throwaway starter only baking once a week. Oh. Yeah. Zero waste once a week, fully risen.
A bit more hydration? Well, so like I'm I I'm doing uh high uh high extraction flour, so it's like uh roughly around 87% off of the berry, which by the way, I think everyone should think about the fact that like when uh when a when a stone miller gives you an extraction number off of sifting, that's different from an extraction number in a roller mill. Very different because when I'm throwing away the extraction that doesn't get part of the flour for me also contains endosperm, unlike the extraction in a roller mill, which contain the the stuff that's left out contains zero endosperm. So 70 something change extraction in a roller mill is much wider, much wider than 70% extraction in a uh in a you know stone mill. Anyway, uh longborn, sorry.
Anyway, so like uh forgot where I started. So yeah, so I just um that's the kind of flour I'm using. So the hydration is relatively higher. And I had been actually cheating and adding extra vital wheat gluten just for insurance, and I realized I I don't need it. You know what I mean?
And um and I don't need to do multiple risings and throwing stuff away. I can just do, you know, my starter's now very you know, fairly old, you know, like years and years old. It lives in the fridge all the time in the same container. So it's I don't know if it's stable. I mean, it's I don't have the knowledge to tell you whether it is or it isn't, but uh, you know, I feed it the same way every time, and I always take out uh and then I add, you know, my I'm a one-to-one starter.
I add an equal amount of so if I take 200 starter, I add 200 of flour, 200 of water, I stay at 100%, no no salt, no nothing. I let that do its initial expansion, and then I one-to-one that. So if I have 200 of that, then I add 200 more of flour, and then I add um, or I can add a little more. That one's a little more wheel room, and then I take it to 78% hydration. Yeah.
Let it sit for an hour or two after I shaggy mix it, and then put the salt in. And I fit like with those kind of like abilities to give the the culture a kickstart, it rises fine. Yeah, it's quite resilient, right? Yeah, you know, rises fine. So I have a zero throwaway.
So like I'm super happy with it. It's just an extra, you know. I have to, you know, I need an extra six hours of thinking or eight hours of thinking ahead of time, you know. But other than that, so I'm stoked, you know. Uh anyway, all right.
So uh calling your questions to uh if you're listening on Patreon, uh 917-410-1507. That's 917-410-1507. Uh and right, I got a thing. Oh, Quinn, you didn't sorry, man. My bad.
What do you got? Well, you were doing your story, you know. I apologize, man. I apologize. What do you got?
Well, actually, I have one small thing. The tragedy is the opposite of your story with the starter. My heirloom yogurt culture finally died after like three years. What killed it? And in what and in what way did it go did it go ropey?
Well it just we made yogurt. I always have a separate little jar that we use for the starter. We reset everything and then it just didn't sit. Huh. Do you know what the the the um this the culture I've never been able to keep alive my ever?
I've done it like four or five times is uh rice bran. Always it always goes bad on me. To be honest, I don't use rice brown, I use wheat bran because I have a lot of wheat bran. I broke it down and I've ordered some keeper grains. I'm gonna give it a go.
Give it a go. Some what some what kind of uh yeah, I'll you know what? I have rice bran now. Now that I have a rice polisher, I have rice brand. I can make a rice bran pickle.
I could see whether or not it's rice polisher game changer. I freaked Wiley out. Wiley Dufrey, my brother-in-law, came to my house and he's like, You want should we have rice? With I forget what I was making. He's like, Do you want rice?
I'm like, Yeah, sure. So I pulled out uh I had like a bunch of brown jasmine around. And originally I bought the rice miller for wheat because I do a lot of wheat experiments, but then I had this brown jasmine rice that had gone a little bit rancid. You know how when you open up brown rice and it's like it's got a little bit of that cardboard y stale smell. I was like, uh no, I'm not gonna eat this.
So I polished off the outside and it smelled fresh again and it was like semi-brown. I'm all about the semi-brown now. Yeah, it's a great idea. I did I did semi-brown um coup like a couple weeks ago. My son had his yearly sushi party, which is all he asked for, is yearly sushi party.
So it's an excuse to go buy a whole side of Oracle salmon and like, you know, cut it up, cure it and all this. Uh not cure it, but you know, uh get it ready for uh for uh sushi. And I have to make the rice, and he sits there and he fans it and he does all the stuff. And so this year I bought uh Nishiki Brown because it was the best brown I could buy locally, and you know, I didn't mail away because I'm too lazy. And uh I milled it to Sammy Brown.
He didn't notice it, but it tasted better. How big is the mill? Tiny. Oh my gosh. Tiny.
It's basically it's tiny. It looks like a little colander with a spinning doodle in it, and it and you can mill it however much you want. You can mill it from just taking the outside off in case, like like I say, it's a little bit rancid on the outside, you want to freshen it. You can even refreshen already milled rice. I mean, I don't know that that's really a problem, but you can do it.
Anyway. Well, it's interesting. So like you probably could do like for first experiments, but I'm told that the polishers for sake are very complicated. This is literally literally a paddle, just like wow. Yeah, and you want to put in the appropriate type of rice that has that dense core.
Otherwise it's kind of yeah, you know. Yeah, well, uh uh wait. Oh, I know we were just calling so calling your question to nine one seven four one oh fifteen oh seven. That's nine one uh seven four one oh fifteen oh seven. Uh if you're listening on the Patreon and John, why don't you tell them or or Quinn, tell them what you uh why they might want to join the Patreon.
You can take it away this time, Quinn. I feel like I'm the usual one who does it. Okay. Yeah. Uh well, the Patreon gets you priority questions answered.
Uh you'll get amazing promo cards. Although this time I forgot to uh tell Jo uh Joe that he edited it out. Uh last week or the previous week, we had um Matt Sarkwell, and he did actually give us a public code like issue ten, which is a public code. But if you are a patron, you'll get a better code. And in general, promo codes for Kitchen Arts and Letters and some of our other sort of friends of the show are only available to patrons.
Uh and you get to join the uh Discord as well. A lot of great uh conversation happening there. Yeah, and send your questions for n say this week I thought we're going to LA, but that got shifted next week, thankfully, so that we could have this uh mockley discussion today. And on the twenty-fifth of February, which is I think is that the next guest in, John, the twenty-fifth, we have Osai Endelin, who is the uh author of such books as the uh uh Black Flower Kitchen, which is the get that's the ghetto gastro cookbook. Correct.
Uh and also the quotes for the uh uh museum food and drinks African slash American quilt. Yeah, exactly. So you know, send in your questions for I don't know what it's like to write those books or right? Yeah, write those books, be involved in that kind of food history and culture about food writing and things like that. She's a really good author.
Nice. All right. Uh all right, so Makoli. Let's get into it. So uh like I said, I went to Seoul and I wanted to is I mean that there's such amazing cocktail culture that the drinking culture there is uh b bananas, like to say, but uh so I went there and I was kind of like, Oh my god, because the only uh you know, mockly I'd had here was pasteurized, a bottled, like uh for a long time, like stable, and anyone who I like it fine, you know what I mean?
But anyone who had it with me who had had real was like and was it like the sweet six percent ABV style? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, the most the most kind of thing that was real were the bowls they were serving them in. But uh so then when I went there, it's just I was shocked by the breadth of it. So before we get into the particulars of you know, you two and the company, why don't we just give a primer because I think a lot of people, myself included, like it's you know the incredible kind of uh diversity of products and uh kind of flavors and experiences you can get with rice-based spirits in Korea.
I think people don't understand why it's different from any other culture's rice-based spirit. Yeah, absolutely. Well, let's just start with the fact that there is almost a little more than 3,000 breweries in South Korea alone making makuli today. Not beer, not wine, not sake, right? Um this boom or this resurgence in Korean brewing from the country um didn't come out of nowhere.
There had been, you know, smaller, I guess, upward trends between, you know, the 1980s starting um starting in the 1980s, coming into the early 2000s with the export of mockly, um, where there was like a return to a product that was otherwise seen as cheap or for you know, workers or um you know, for like a sp certain type archetype of old man drink. An old man, right? Um, of a person in Korea. Um not made by the old man but drunk by the old man. Well both.
Really? Right, which is a really interesting history because makuli, like many other ta types of alcohol from all over the world, have a has a 2,000 plus year history in the country where a lot of it was produced by women, right? Um and there was as much style, if not more, variance in style, if not more than there is today. Um but the pasteurized makoli that you're kind of referring to, it's not just the fact that it's pasteurized that makes it taste the way it does. It's the fact that it's made often with you know uh bleached wheat flowers or tapioca starches, and on top of that, it's you know, brewed with pure refined enzymes and yeast inoculates, and then brewed hot and fast and then diluted and aspartan.
That's what gives it that specific taste that may not be to your liking or may not be to the liking of some drinking. I think it's fine, it's just not nearly as interesting. It's it's nowhere near as interesting, and it's not accurately representative of the deep history of the category, right? So the way we define makuli um is any grain based alcohol that is fermented with nouk. Um, explain what nook is because everyone's like, oh, koji this, koji that.
Explain explain this as its own ferment. Yeah, nuduk is typically a wheat and barley based inoculate, but there's other substrates that are involved. You know, there's nudics made with rice, there's nudics made with mung bean, um, but typically wheat and barley, and it's an inoculate of wild fungi, including aspergillus, but many, many variants of aspilaspergillus. Um, and then uh wild yeast in the same starter, as well as with tons of other bugs, but predominantly a lot of lactobacillus. Nuduk's unique nature is that one, it's a polyculture, right?
And not just like specifically within the fungi or specifically within the yeast, but across all families of the microbes. And it's the fact that it's all inoculated into one starter as well that makes it unique. Typically anywhere between a three to six months production process where the substrate is coarsely ground, wetted, formed into dense cakes, then inoculated either open air or in these rooms called undor. And then there's a process of cure inoculating the cultures, which takes significantly longer than when you're inoculating a single grain of rice, like with koji, because that fungi has to burrow through like an inch and a half to sometimes three inches worth of material, and then a long drying and curing process afterwards so that the starter can be used at any point, not immediately after. So there's some fundamental differences in the microbial makeup of the starter, especially when compared to a methodology like sake, or sake making and the use of koji.
And then it's the fact that you have a parallel ferment. You have the conversion of starch to sugar and sugar to alcohol truly from day one. It's not like that like beer or sake, where a yeast culture is typically pitched in a few days later, right? Or after the wart is made or after the maromi is made. So you have competition between these kind of trends or these types of fermentation from day one.
On top of that, it's a microbially diverse starter, so it's making lots of different flavor. Purity, like we talk about in the context of sake, is not chemically possible in Sioux, nor is it culturally wanted. Right. Yeah, you're not looking to it's there's no uh what's it called, like apotheosis of the polish. You know what I mean?
It's like and the philosophy is about balance. And then where a producer lands in that balance, whether it's like us where it's like dry and strong, or another producer that can be a bit more sweet, right? No matter where you land in that balance, that's then your style. Right. Some of them are high acid, some of them are low acid.
Exactly. And then you will get into a minute like do you filter, do you not, do you do it once, do you do it twice, do you do it three times? Do you do it with adjuncts? You know what I mean? Where is your rice from, et cetera.
Do you filter? How much do you filter? Do you know what I mean? Like it's just I mean, it's just the the size of the palette you have to work with is very large. You know what I mean?
Um but back to the Naurook, because for those, you know, who haven't like looked into this at all, I think well, another thing that surprised me is even within when so when you think of like obviously that you know, my friends like Rich Sheen and you know, they'll they have spent a lot of time thinking about like the variants even in Koji, but a lot of that is cultures that people are buying, especially because people frankly people are afraid of making their own koji. Yeah, I mean, aspergillas can be messed up. You know what I mean? Yeah. But you know, there people are, you know, inoculating various specific things, but there's such a huge variance, not just of the actual individual organisms that are in it, but just even of the styles of how they're made.
Like I was, you know, watching people like, well, we make, you know, we make things that look like uh like uh what are those? Uh they're square, what's that cereal that crackling oat brand? They look like ours look like crackling like crackling oat brand. You know what I mean? Like ours are round, ours are this shape, and like you know, ours have a dimple in the middle, and then like you know, this is how we stomp it flat, you know, to get it compressed, to get it super compressed.
You know, we do it in hay, we do it in this other leaf, you know, it's like all of these variants, and then from what I can tell, based on the little I know, each one of those little things has a huge impact in the in the the makeup of the culture and then the finished product that you have. Absolutely. And the and on top of that, there's even more complexity, right? It's the it's a question of where was that nuduk made, and where was the cereals from, and what were they exposed to, and what was the weather like, you know, um, and there is like a sense of it's not like terroir in the traditional sense of the word, like when it comes to vinifera and the way we talk about grape wines, but there absolutely is a unique microbial terroir that Nuduk is able to capture that other, I guess, more like post-industrial styles of starters cannot, right? And that's what we've been working on with at Hanamakali is trying to show people that this unique starter can also create products that are versatile, functional, easy to pair, um, and are relevant to our palettes today.
Um, and the way we do that is by you know, not obscuring the nudic with additional yeast inoculates and driving the flavor a certain direction. Um, or we don't, you know, of course, we don't like acidify and mineralize our um waters. Um, we don't add additives of any kind. And you know, one in part because that's not who like what we're trying to stand for as I guess a more premium Korean rice wine brand, but it's also like more simple of a philosophy. It's that it doesn't need it.
And that's just that. Yeah. Yeah. Um more. Oh, I read.
I mean, obviously it's alive because you ferment with it. But uh, you know, unlike, for instance, you know, if you're buying like a yeast pack from Y Yeast or whatever, right? Uh, like it changes even depending on how you store it. So I read this one person was like, don't buy it on, you know, in a vacuum package and then use it right away. It has to like come back to life, like hang it outside, like, you know, like let the sun hit it.
Popje, yeah. Yeah, it's a like sun sterilizer. Yeah, what is it? Is that I don't even know if it does anything. Um, but it's it's a practice that, you know, Korean culture and gastronomy is about preservation in all the forms, right?
And popcha is a practice that you'll find across, you know, um fermented foods, um, as well as Korean alcohols. Um, and it's just uh it's I think it's for peace of mind, you know. Like if there are happen to be like physical bugs, you know, in in your dried starter, whatever, it gives them an opportunity to kind of like scurry out. Um is some kind of example, like is the way they talk about it colloquially in Korea, but um, I think it's more about like um circulation, right? Like making sure that if there was any like weird gases or something that was forming in that vacuum seal, that you get to off-gas that and we'll introduce to the brew.
But you haven't specifically noticed like a difference between we can't, because we're you know, using hundreds of kilos of Nuduk sometimes, and it we have a 2500 square foot warehouse with a 20-foot wide driveway, like we can't. Um, but sometimes like when we do make flour infusions, we have a chrysanthemum and a hydrangea wine. If it is a sunny day, we'll take that opportunity to send the flowers out. I don't know exactly what it does, but it's nice. I mean I can imagine, but I don't know.
In other words, you know what I mean? Like you can we can hypothesize, but I have no idea. Yeah. There's plenty though of these kinds of stories from Korean brewing, because Korean brewing as an industry is not as um well resourced as the beer industry is or the sake industry is. Um and while there is so many incredible people that are dedicating their lives to the research of sur, we're, you know, frankly, like anywhere between 60 to at least 40 years behind.
Give them that give them that term again in case they're not used to the whole category name of uh Korean uh su. Yeah, yeah. S-O-O-L, S-U-L. Um, like when you say like sou, it can be beer or wine, but in this context, we're talking about it as the term for all Korean alcohols. Right, specifically including soju, including this style of mokli that we make, including the conventional style of mokali that's made, um, including blackberry wines and ginseng infusions, and you know, there's so much, like you said, breadth to the category.
There needs to be a word that encompasses it all. So we choose sure. Hey, uh John, should we taste something before we go further? Or let's do it. What do we got?
What's the what's the first thing we have here? Um so this is pot ju B-E-O-J-J-U. We're not the best at coming up though with the easiest names to say. I had this conversation with uh I forget who, someone on. I was like, the way that like Korean is written in like uh in like you know, like the romanization, right?
Yeah, yeah, that's the right word. The romanization, like I don't understand, like it seems like they made it more confusing for English speakers to pronounce it correctly based on the way there are better ways to write it with this set of alphabet. You know what I mean? But we love it. I mean, it's so cute.
But um it sounds like a cadet, that's like a the singer of a metal band, or maybe the drummer or something like that. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, like from Jersey. They're from Jersey. Yeah.
Um, but this is pochu, and pot the prefix is the pot from cherries, and then chew is the suffix for alcohol in Korean. So um this is a rice and sour cherry coferment, um, made in technically three stages. First two stages were rice, um, and then we allowed it to ferment for about four weeks. As it approached near dryness, we had these cherries, sour cherries sourced from Rose Hill Farm in the Hudson Valley. Um Matt, the cider maker there is a really good friend of ours and was overwhelmed with his summer harvest of cherries as always.
Nice problem to have. Exactly. For us, especially, not for him. Um, and we got them frozen so that the cell walls were pretty broken down. We um let them defrost, press them, put the juice into the rice wine and allowed it to ferment for another like three to four weeks.
Um we did clarify this wine because the sediment kind of made it taste a little bit too much like you know, cough medicine. Right, right. Um with the softening effect. You want to tell people like the like the choice? Do you let it sediment?
Do you not? Do you keep it in? Do you filter it? The names and that kind of ways they're yeah, absolutely. So technically, our pochu is a yakchu.
It's a clarified style. Another term that's used to describe clarified wines is chongju. But pochu overall is, I mean, I know that we're here to introduce Hanamakle, but this is actually like very unique and experimental, and fruit co ferments within the Sue context is not common. So and it's um I've become a pain in John's butt for this reason because I spread us out a lot of things. I think she refers to me picking up the materials or ingredients or whatever.
Yeah. Um but this is very modern modern idea, right? People like doing these kinds of things. And it is actually quite personal, right? Like Matt's a friend, this farm is a farm that we love.
Um this style of sou and co-fermenting with um fruits um is something that like at least this dry of a style of fruit co-ferments is definitely more of a personal exploration. But I think it makes for a beautiful wine. Yeah, it's very bright. And uh the you know, cherry sour cherry especially has uh like a very particular kind of uh backpalate acidity, like uh there's acidity on the front like normal, but like uh a back of the throat. Yeah, yeah.
Um what do you think, John? I think it's delicious. Yeah, no, it's really tasty. And uh what's this what's this rocking at ABV wise? Uh 15.
Yeah, so now 14. What do you think? 14? 14. Well, 14 is the new 15.
Yeah. I mean, I would talk about like you but like who's checking using these uh using like uh no rook in multiple fermentations or whatever, you can without any distillation get a very wide range of ABVs, correct? Absolutely. You can get pretty close to like 20, 22 if you're really pushing things, but you have to understand that, especially when you're using only Nuduk, right? That to get to that level of ABV, it requires technique and it requires long fermentation times.
But the industry today is about it uses yeast inoculates that are extremely powerful, you know, refined enzymes to the point where they don't even have to cook their starches anymore. They could ferment to like 16% in three days. So why would they ever choose to take like three months to get to 22? Right. Unless they can charge enough to make up for it, right?
Exactly. But there's not much of it. Can't do it to scale. There's not much of that, yeah. So that's what we're trying to do in New York is, you know, not like make the craziest, most expensive stuff, but um make things simply.
Do you watch that two-chain show, most expensivist? No. Oh, wait, is that the one with the he just goes with it over the most expensive, like, you know, dump caviar on it, like gold leaf, yeah, the most expensive, you know, sugar honey. So many people's surprise, we are not the most expensive mokle. Yeah.
There's another more expensive one on the well that that's the other thing. So before we go too much further, where can people here's the thing like people who don't live in, I'm sure there's people in LA doing it. I'm sure there's people you're doing it here, but um like where can people go to have this or how how can they experience what you're talking about? Um, there's mainly like two channels, or and now there's three channels through which people can experience. There's of course like getting the conventional types of products, um, mainly from the Korean grocery stores, Asian groceries, um, typically sourced from you know, similar importers and suppliers.
So you'll find mockly in most Asian grocery stores in some ways to be able to do it. Yeah, but that's stuff that's coming in, none of that's the live real stuff. No, and so there's, of course, the one channel is domestic producers. Outside of us, there's about six other domestic producers. All of them are fairly small and up and coming, but it certainly is more than four years ago when we started.
And they're in LA, they're in Seattle, they're in Georgia, so people can go to there. Um, and then there's like the imports, like um Kim Som or Kung Moon Kim, he's a master somalier turned um importer and started KMS imports, he imports, you know, several skews of um artisanal soju's and a few artisanal mocklees, yeah. But they are pasteurized. No, it's not the same. We are also pasteurized.
Right, but how long do you w let them stay? Well, we ferment we're fermenting for four weeks plus, but uh then we pasteurize them in bottle, typically within a week of bottling. And how good are how long do they stay the way you want them? They age beautifully because of their t pH, though, and their TA, not necessarily because they're pasteurized or not pasteurized. Right.
So you're doing one of the more high acid stuff. So you think the ones that are lower acid don't hold as well? No, they kind of disintegrate. Um and that's with any beverage, right? Like acidity is a pres like preservation method, and you know, being able to get a great finishing pH around 3.5, 3.6 is critical to the longevity of your wine, whether it's pasteurized or not.
So you don't believe, and again, like I've never made this stuff, so I don't know. But like so, you don't believe necessarily that it needs to be quote unquote alive when you're drinking it, as long as you're not uh dam damaging its profile or jacking it with something to stop it from moving. Right, exactly. So, like on the on the question of heat, for example, when you pasteurize, like pasteurization is not just a factor of temperature, it's also a factor of time. So you can pasteurize at slightly lower temperatures, but for a longer period of time and not affect the flavor as much.
And that's certainly what we do. We also like use steam, you know, instead of water baths, and we don't we use pasteurize in bottle so that the wine's flavor is preserved and it's not too rounded. Um then outside of that, like a lot of times when you're trying conventional or non-conventional makalies, you're gonna sometimes you're gonna get that like really round, like I ate too much milk chocolate kind of taste, and get that stuffiness in your chest. That's koji. It's not pasteurization, it's the taste of koji, right?
And it's the use of koji in makali that drives a certain type of flavor that people have grown to love. But what people need to understand is that that's relatively contemporary that sense of nostalgia for this product. Um it wasn't until like the 1960s or 70s when we started making mock ali the way we do now in the majority of the market. Prior to that, there was variance, there was, you know, style, there was um certainly stronger ABVs and lower sugar levels. But right now the median is like squarely 22 grams per liter plus, and it's insane.
Um you uh so you can ship then. Yeah, we can ship. Um we actually started up in COVID. So our whole plan, like every other beverage brand that starts up, is you know, a mix of wholesale and direct-to-consumer, but mainly it was wholesale. We were excited about getting to our restaurants and our bars before the launch, and then COVID completely wiped it out.
So we had to pivot really hard to direct to consumer. Pasteurizing our bottles makes it safe enough to be able to ship and grow that direct-to-consumer side of the business at a time where it was our only choice. Um like, and we did some crazy things back in the day. Like John, we no one no rice wine breweries were allowed to ship to California. Um John single-handedly lobbied the ABC.
Well, why was that? Was like the category just wasn't, they hadn't set it up or they they they made a distinction between rice-based wines and grape wines, which I which I called into question. I was like, that's not fair. And California being who they are, they agreed and they changed their regulation on that. So yeah, now we can ship DTC to California.
And so can we even for a Long Island kid, they changed the rules. I didn't tell them. I didn't tell them that. No, and so can men now all the new domestic breweries that are making sakes or soot or Xiaomi Joe or Sato or whatever they decide to make, if they're licensed as a rice wine brewery or manufacturer by the TTB, they can now just ship to California because of John Lynn. So it's really fun, like the the way we started.
All right, so speaking of star, let's go back. So we have the Naruk, but now what's the process? You crumb you have rice. You guys use a mix of uh sweet and and short grain or yeah, medium grain white rice and sweet white rice, both table varieties that we get from Pollet Farms in uh Maxwell, California. And how much does the rice matter?
The actual rice. The rice matters a ton, but um I think it's more in terms, obviously it's it's more in terms of starch content rather than flavor. But when you're fermenting with no duke and not yeast inoculates, that can like create certain flavors, um like I'm talking about like I don't know, a Sauvignon yeast strain, like making anything taste like Sauvignon, you know. Um without without that context, then the rice matters. So our rice is uh also farmed organically, which is quite rare for the staple grain industry.
It makes a huge difference in the quality of the rice and the health of your ferment, especially when you're not using inoculates. Um and then, you know, there's of course like the farming practices as well. Californian farmers, they have to dry farm because of the drought and water supply. But um dry farming is also far more sustainable than wet farming. It releases less methane into the air.
So it's not necessarily a flavor consideration in that case, but it is an environmental consideration. But to go back to the flavor, so when you're deciding on a mix, like what what is the impact of using like more sweet rice versus less sweet rice? Yeah, so more sweet rice than like we're solidly like you know, anywhere between a fourth to a third is medium grain white rice and the rest is sweet white rice. But some recipes call for all medium grain, or some recipes call for all sweet rice. And mainly, of course, it has to do deal with the available sugars and then therefore the available alcohol.
Um, but that density also affects texture. And so if you're fermenting, let's say a medium sweet wine from medium grain versus a medium sweet wine from sweet white rice, but you're finishing both at like, let's say 14 bricks, right? The textures of those two wines are gonna feel very different, and the aromas will feel much more different as well. So that those factors being a part of flavor and what we experience matter when it comes to rice selection and the quantities within. Right.
So you so you steam, you steam them all out, right? Um how do you cook the rice? There's many ways you can cook your rice. No matter what, you're washing, soaking, and draining your rice. Um and then there becomes variants.
You can grind your rice and make a porridge. You could not grind your rice and make a porridge. Porridges are typically saved for the first day of fermentation, what we call mitsu, the base ferment, or the pied de couve or whatever. Um and then uh then you can also start, like as you advance in your stages, if you are doing staged out brewing, you then come across methods like peksuki, which is grinding your rice and steaming it without additional water to make like a ground rice cake. Um you could also make pombok, which is grinding rice, striking it with boiling water, and you could parboil it, it not to complete gelatinization, but partially.
Um, you could of course steam your whole grain, but there's crazier methods. Like you can grind your rice, form donuts with it, boil it, and then smash it and ferment it to make like a solid pudding texture type of sou called iwa ju. How's that taste? Um delicious. Donut.
And it's great for transport back in the day when there wasn't refrigeration, right? Um, but there's many ways in which you can cook your rice. There is, of course, two parameters it boils down to hydration and surface area. So, how available are your starches, therefore, your sugars, or eventually your sugars for the ferment. And then hydration, how much new water are you adding to a brew via the method of cooking rice?
Um, typically, at least for us and for most commercial breweries or that are making traditional styles of alcohol, they're anywhere between three to five stages on average. That takes a week and a half to three weeks to build, but some recipes call for spreading those feeds out over you know an entire year, right? Can you explain for a minute that because I think this is also foreign to like most people's understanding of fermented alcohol is this multi-stage, multiple feeding kind of regimen. Yeah. So you have to imagine that like your nuduk is starting a parallel ferment, right?
It's converting starches to sugar and then sugar to alcohol. But if you were to introduce all of the potential starches available for the nudic right away from the very first day, it's very possible that it won't be able to convert all of the starches, and there's gonna be a lot of residual starch. Um and it's also very possible that you won't be able to get the ferment to the alcohol, I mean the yeast will die from osmatic pressure eventually, right? There's gonna be just so much sugar in the wine that the yeast will just peter out and die before it finishes. Um if you're not looking for a really uh lively uh potentially explosive, super sweet wine, then you want to start spreading out your feed so that that convergence can start following closer to a bell curve and be a little bit more elongated.
So while you're converting your sugars, right, you know, by the second or the third feed, you'll be reaching your peak sugar level instead of from you know day four or day five. And then during that time, that course of a week, your yeast culture has time to build up and flocculate. Um, and then at some point, right? The sugar conversion is not the dominant process, and then the alcohol production takes off. But by that point, the majority of the sugars have been converted.
So towards the end of the ferment, you'll have complete conversion of starch sugar and complete conversion of sugar to alcohol. If you're making dry and hopefully stable wines, that is the goal. So for the style that you're looking at, stable, it's always malt, you're never doing like a one-shot ferment or we haven't yet. It's also a huge waste of ingredients, right? Like you're just not gonna you're like you have to like double up on your rice quantities and you have to double up on your nude quantities, all to make like something that is very, very uh it changes a lot in bottle, let's just say.
Yeah. Um speaking, should we try something else or not? Um this is takchu. When you tell what what you're doing with the bottle, like boop-boop-boop-boop. Oh, yeah.
So we're doing we recommend a gentle shake on our wines, like a gentle tipping, um, especially because some of them have a little bit of effervescence. It's not like soji where you should like make a tornado with it, you know. Um, and the takchu um has in particular has a lot of sediment. Um, depending on, you know, this the brewery and the style that you're drinking, some may have more or less sediment. Let me go, John.
Um it's important to kind of like incorporate it. There is a practice of like pouring the clear wine off and saving the sediment for dilution. Um, but at least at our brewery, if we're making a product, we don't do splitting and blending. So if we're making takchu, we're making it with the intention of it being drunk with the sediment, versus if we're making something that's clear like pochu, right? We're we have the clarification in mind when we're developing the recipe.
So the intention is there for it to be finished clear, right? If we wanted it to finish with sediment, we would have probably brewed it differently. Because uh there is like you said, there's also sometimes the practice of uh taking the sediment from a higher alcohol production and watering it down, right? Absolutely. Yeah, it's down to like five, six percent, right?
I mean, it's a lot like Soju and like the overall trends um in that space where everything's just getting lower and lower ABV. But people what people don't realize is for artisanal producers that you know, thank you, um, that you know, put a ton of time, energy, blood, sweat, tears, and money into the ingredients, the the you know, what goes into the tanks, to then take that and di to dilute it by more than 60% water, is like why would I ever do that? And so, like uh for those that have not tried this style before, I just can't say more clearly what a different experience it is drinking these products than drinking if all you're used to in non-distilled rice products is sake. This is not taste like sake. It's not in the same ballpark as sake.
It is completely different taste to me. What do you think, John? Yeah, no, agreed. It's definitely its own thing. It's not similar to sake in any way, shape, or form.
Yeah, it's its own product. What are you getting on Takju? The one, that second one that I just poured. Like some nice yogurt y kind of notes almost? Like a nice creaminess to it.
Yeah. A bit fruity, you know. Mm-hmm. There is the gory sake, which is unfiltered, which has some similarities. But right, but it still has a taste like sake.
Right. You know what I mean? Like and what you were saying before, like the taste of the koji. There's a specific thing, which I like, but it's not the same product. You know what I mean?
Absolutely. And this, you have like your all your flavors are kind of a bit a bit more explosive, a bit more spread out. Um, and then there's of course the acidity. Um, we made this is like the closest thing to conventional mockley that we make. It finishes around eight grams per liter of glucose, um, which you know it's a lot of sugar overall still for a dry wine.
But um glucose is not as sweet as sucrose or fructose. By the way, eight grams per liter of sugar is that's less than one percent, right? No, that is one percent. It's about eight grams is one percent, almost one percent. So it's still low.
It's still very low, like not detectable on the palate. And you know, if anyone knows makle, they'll drink our takchu and be like, oh yeah, that's a dry mockly. I find people, I have found this in the bar world. People have a difficulty because when you say grams per liter, they think of it as percent, but it's ten times less than percent. You know what I mean?
Like one gram per liter is a tenth of a percent. You know what I mean? So it's like people get I've had when you give people recipes, this is a problem. You're like, add, you know, add you know, one percent, and they add one gram to a liter, and you're like, no, that's a tenth of a percent. You know what I mean?
Like, extra thousand. Right. Yeah. It's a thousand, not a hundred. A liter is a thousand people.
A grams equals one milliliter. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Milliliter. Um, we did just come out with a product called mock eight, which is a conventional mock lead. It's a little much lower.
A bit sweeter. Maybe eight percent. We didn't bring that one today. No, it's it's our first can product, which is which is cool. And is there a jet aeroplane on it?
It sounds like it's like a like mock speed, actually. Yeah, there is. It would be extremely fast for an airplane, fact faster than any plane has ever traveled. It's a little eight ounce can, so you can like drink it quick too. And um more of an experimental style.
Yeah. No, like uh what I always say, drink quickly but responsibly. You know what I mean? Like, yeah. Which you've seen me do, John.
Yes, very much. Yeah. Yeah. All right. So now I think we've got to the point where we can ask Jordan's question and have it be reasonable.
Uh Jordan asks, every time I read up on Korean mold ferments, I'm surprised people rely on seemingly wild inoculation of uh I mean I'm gonna read it straight with their terminology, okay? Um uh seemingly wild inoculation of meju by using rice stalks as an aspergilla source. Yet in Japanese ferments I rarely hear about wild inoculation, and instead koji spores are widely available for purchase for direct inoculation. Excuse me. Uh I realize Japan and Korea have complex history related to traditional jang production and suppressing Korean artisanal culture, but are there really no Korean artisans using Koji spores to make rice and soy ferments?
Or is the aspergillus used in Korean meju? This is not a question specifically about what you're doing, but just I think it's interesting to talk about the different in general. Um or is the aspergillus using Korean mew distinct from Japanese koji? Relying on wild inoculation every time just seems so risky from a quality control and food safety perspective. Any information and resources you're willing to share on this topic would be greatly appreciated.
Okay. I can take this one. No. Please do. So, you know, when it comes to uh the fungi and how it's inoculated, right?
Um of course, so you we have to understand. Okay, let me take a step back. So there is actually uh polyculture fungi used in the context of Japanese sake production. It's just there's not that many producers doing it. And on top of that, the Japanese sake industry has such an amazing governing body that has put in so much money into the research of specific sake koji aspergillus cultures and yeast cultures that can be used by producers, that that's why it feels like that's the majority of the industry and what's available to homemakers and things like this.
But there is absolutely uh polyculture fermentation within sake. But it's viewed as like artisanal or a little bit more like niche within a niche, but it is the traditional way. And there is written evidence um and documented history of the uh Mongolian polyculture starter. I forget the name, but it's similar to like Chinese yeast balls. And the migration of that use of methodology into Korea and Japan, and um even documentation of uh Korean brewing methods, the use of nuduk being taken to Japan and being applied in Japan as well.
So all of this is all more interconnected than people think, first of all. Um there is a shared history, and ultimately it all comes from the brewing and distilled distillation methods that came down with you know the Mongolian invasion of the Asian pen of the Asian uh continent. So to say that like sake and surct from one another, but to say that they're not related is kind of silly. And then the modern practice espouses that with the fact that Korean brewers are using koji in their production. Most conventional breweries are using koji instead of nuduk in their production, right?
Um, and it's because a monoculture is indeed more resilien is indeed more reliable, more consistent, and predictable, right? But the interesting thing about nuduk-based production is is that of course there's variants batch to batch, and if especially if you're starting from scratch and making your nudok at home and then brewing at home, there's gonna be huge variants. But there's also nudic producers that, you know, the ones that are left in Korea are at most 200 years old, and there's a reason why, right? It's because this method of making was suppressed for a long time, unfortunately. But those producers, they're actually producing fairly consistent nudokes because the spaces in which that they're uh inoculating them perpetuates this like very strong ecosystem of fungi and yeast from batch to batch.
So there isn't actually that much variance as much many people expect. But from a single nudic producer, of course, their summer nudics could be different from their winter nudics. And of course, there is variance depending on like the quality, what happened to the wheat that year, what happened to the barley that year, and things like this. But um I think we've gotten to a point with nudic production where you can still create a fairly consistent product if you know how to respond to variants, right? So we'll do small batches every time we do we get a new uh shipment of nudic from Korea.
Um we'll even do small batches when we get uh when we change harvest on rice just to make sure, right? And then we'll adjust our recipes accordingly if there is variance, like let's say yeast is not as viable in this batch as it was as it was in the last batch, the cell count is less, right? Then we have to account for a longer building up time um in the early stages of the ferment, or we have to increase the pitch rate a little bit, or things like this. So um it's not actually very difficult to make a consistent product despite a wild starter. It's a matter of practice and getting to know your starter.
So speaking of practice, I read that you grew up brewing this stuff. So you're not like uh person completely to the thing you grew up. This is something you grew up doing in California. Yeah, right. Um and so do you think I'm not gonna ask you when you were born, but you know, I've read that like a lot of this stuff only started coming back in Korea after you were allowed to use, you know, the products again.
I mean, obviously, you know, a hundred years or whatever it was of colonial control and et cetera, et cetera, where you couldn't make whatever you wanted. But what was that like in the States for do you think versus Korea and growing up making it versus like part of this kind of newer like group of people, even Koreans who are just coming back to it? Yeah, um, I mean we love talking about the Korean American story because I, you know, while we make booze, we both John and I are Korean American, and um it's it's an important part of who we are at Hanamakoli. And um the thing about um homebrewers, specifically of my parents' generation, when they immigrated here, um, it's like it's as if they were taking like even today, me and me and my dad or me and my mom, like we'll always out we'll always have like little tiffs because it feels like they're trapped in time. Like that, like people in Korea are even more progressive than they are on certain topics, but they think Korean, all Koreans are as conservative as they are when it comes to those topics because they moved away from the country, you know, five decades, four decades.
Yeah, my business partner Don Lee used to joke that when he goes back to Korea, he sounds like an 80-year-old businessman. Yeah, you know what I mean? Like it's it's it's a really strange experience. But when how that kind of like manifests in the sharing of makoli, right, is is that um makali homebrewing for the people that are fortunate enough to still have it in their families, um, alive in their families, is very much like a um it's a very tr like a very like rustic tradition. People treat it as if it is cooking, right?
And so um when you learn how to do it, you learn how to brew intuitively, much like you learn to cook intuitively in this culture, and um there's a lot to gain from unprecise brewing as well, because your skills, your observations, then your ability to notice patterns in the brew, um that is something when it comes to polyculture fermentation, is not formulaic. So um I think it was like a really formidable important experience to have that growing up. And I don't know, and John, did you also grow up brewing or no? I absolutely did not. But you had experience with Makali when you try my uncle's home brew in Incheon 30 years ago and after a game in tennis, um which I'll always remember.
But uh no, I I've always had an interest in in the category, but I certainly wasn't a home brewer. So I don't expect you to be able to answer this because I don't know that it has a reasonable answer, but uh like uh what do you think the difference would be versus someone that and as far as I know, there's only one English language book on this subject called like how to brew Korean rice wine, and you can get a Kindle version of it for very cheap, and I don't really know anything about the subject, but seems okay. Um but uh what is there like if someone's just coming to it and they don't have a family culture, like you have an ingrown kind of compass and an ingrown set of this is the way w we have done it in my family, so you have like kind of a like a North Star. Like uh that's gotta be inherently different from someone who just is like, I'm gonna do this, right? Right.
I mean, like uh Well, then I and then I then I talk about the universal laws of fermentation. Right? Because two minutes, two minutes. Yeah. Despite the the differences between the categories and what makes them all unique, yeast are yeast, fungi are fungi, enzymes are enzymes.
So what you find beloved in a Saison or in a lambic or in a natural wine, you might be able to find a similar joy in Makali, even though it has an opaque texture. Yeah. Is there anything else you're gonna pour while we're while we're waiting? And then I'm gonna ask you some questions. First of all, you can buy it, go to what uh what's your website?
Hanamakali.com. Hanamakali.com. You have a tasting room in Greenpoint that you can go to. Uh where is that? Uh on DuPont, east of the bridge, um, between McGuinness and Provost for open Friday through Sunday.
And you can get our products um on pasteurized there on tap. Absolutely. Ah, reason to go. Yes. Thank you so much.
Good hit. So what's this last product you have here? Hanosoji 60. It's a single distillation of Talk 216 that you're trying now. It's 120 proof.
It's gorgeous. Oh geez, Louise. All right. Listen, uh, we didn't get a chance to answer a lot of the uh other questions, but I think we're gonna try to do a show from well, the you know, non-Makali questions. Uh so we're gonna try to, I think, do a show from LA next week when I'm in um Los Angeles.
Um so we'll talk about that stuff then. All right, so talk a little bit in the 32 seconds we have left about just Hanamakali and starting it. Um, I mean, it's been a joy full five years since we started, but John and I have been really working on this closer to 10 years together. Um, Korean rice wine, while it still is a very niche category, is um has more prospectus, more potential than even sake did, you know, 10 15 years ago. Um the amount of passion and love that uh chefs that uh writers that uh people in the arts are putting behind Korean gastronomy is um really incredible today.
And um we hope that people are able to join enjoy Hanamakali um and learn something new about the category, about Korea's deep history as we grow in our collective understanding about Korean culture. Awesome. Well thanks so much. Alice Joan and John Lim from Hanamakley, go try their products and you know, go taste some, get you some makali cooking issues.
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