KOREAN ALCOHOLS: PART 1
We'll start with my personal favorite:
SOJU (소주)
Ah, Soju. The mainstay alcohol of Korea. This stuff is potent, very popular with old men, and dangerously cheap. The alcohol content of soju ranges from 30-80 proof (that's 15-40% alcohol), but I prefer the lower end. To give you an idea of alcohol content, most vodka is about 80 proof/40% alcohol, and Captain Morgan Original Spiced Rum is 70 proof/35% alcohol. Drinking soju is basically like drinking straight-up liquor.
Soju is essentially drinkable rubbing alcohol. Really. It has a slight sweetness to it, but it tastes like rubbing alcohol. The crazy thing is that I actually love it! I think it's delicious. Soju is cheap, safe for my malt allergy, and ridiculously easy to get--they sell it in every convenience store, including 7/11, for about a dollar. Some are better than others, and so far my favorite brand is the Chamisool mild, which has a little picture of the sky on the bottle.
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| Three brands of soju I bought today. They each cost less than US$1. My favorite is on the far left. |
But how can I truly say that Chamisool is my favorite unless I try others? Today I bought two 'flavors' of another brand. One says 'mild' in English; the other is a mystery, though by its red color I'm guessing it's stronger. In the name of science, I set up a blind taste test with three cups.
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| Yeah, science! |
According to my very reliable two-person study, the red-capped bottle was definitely the worst. It didn't taste so much like rubbing alcohol, but rather had an odd, harsh bite to it that we didn't enjoy. Unsurprisingly, it had an alcohol content of 20%, the highest in my 'study.' There was a tie on the other two flavors. I prefer the green-cap brand, which has an alcohol content of 19% and a pleasant, slightly sweet smell and taste. This one tastes the most like rubbing alcohol, but it's sweet-ish. The blue-cap bottle was Eric's favorite. It was the mildest but wasn't as sweet as the green-cap bottle, and had the lowest alcohol content at 16%.
(If at this point you're wondering if I only wrote this review as the pretext for getting drunk... well, you're not totally wrong. But this is a valuable cultural experience!)
But back to business. Soju comes in a wide range of sizes, from juice boxes to jugs. The most popular size is a 360ml green glass bottle (above), which can be purchased alone or in a 24-pack. The largest size I've seen is 10 liters, although the largest size in the photo below is a mere 5L. So, double that. I haven't even checked the capacity of the soju jugs at Costco.
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| Korean old men drink this stuff like water. It comes in a wide variety of sizes! |
The smallest sizes I've seen are the juicebox and plastic flask, which are both 200ml. These cost less than US$1 each, and they're more convenient than the glass bottles because they're lighter. When I go out I often bring a flask of soju, just in case we end up in a park or the bar we choose doesn't have anything I can drink.
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| Imagine if other liquors came in juiceboxes. Just imagine. |
For someone with a malt allergy like me, soju is a lifesaver. Rum is my drink of choice in America, but it's not popular here. I can't drink beer or whiskey because they're malted, and most bars here don't list the ingredients of their cocktails in Korean, let alone in English. This means that I have no idea if something contains a malted liquor, so this is a bit of a danger for me. Unfortunately, most bars don't sell soju because it's too cheap to be profitable. My solution? Smuggle in my own soju. It ain't classy, but it's cheap and it's saved me from gastrointestinal distress many a night. I will certainly miss soju when I get back to America!
MAESIL (매실)
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| Seoljungmae maesil! |
Maesil ("may-sheel") is a Korean plum wine. The fruit of the Prunus mume is called a Chinese plum or a Japanese apricot. It's closer to an apricot, but I'm going to call it a Korean plum. It is apparently a separate fruit from the loquat, which is also called a Chinese plum, but seeing as how I've never tasted either fruit I can't really say how similar they taste.
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| Apparently a loquat, but they look identical on a tree. Photo courtesy of genuineaid.com. |
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| Somewhat riper Japanese apricots. Photo courtesy of eatpress.com. |
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| Very pretty. I'm sure I'll get a few shots of my own in the near future, but this photo was taken by Douglas Triggs. |
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| Douglas, dude, I hope my photos turn out half as nice as yours. |
Anyway, back to the alcohol. I bought the cheapest brand of maesil I could find, which cost about $3. It's called Seoljungmae (설중매) and it comes in a pretty green bottle. Inside the bottle are three Korean plums, which all look very fancy.
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| Oh, so fancy. |
The wine itself is yellow and clear. It smells like exactly like apple cider. I also took off the cap to taste the plums.
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| Is that teacup cute or what? |
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| Looks a bit like an olive. |
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| Ahp, there's a pit. |
Unfortunately the maesil tastes like one part apple cider mixed with three parts rubbing alcohol. It's awful and I can't take a single sip without cringing. (And keep in mind, I love soju, which actually does taste like mild rubbing alcohol.) The plums were not quite as bad but still awful; imagine biting into a very unripe nectarine that tastes like rubbing alcohol. This stuff is truly bad all the way around.
SANSACHOON
This is another fruit wine. The thing about wine in Korea is that it's all rice wine with fruity infusions; the wines aren't actually made from fermented fruit. Surprisingly, I kinda like it! The rice wine tends to be less sharp. (Is that a real wine term? I don't drink a lot of wine.)
Anyway, this stuff is pretty good. It has a pleasant peachy color and a sweet, soft taste. It's infused with 'sansa and sansuyu fruits,' which as far as I can tell are apples and the fruit of dogwood trees, respectively. The fruit of a dogwood tree is called a 'cornus fruit,' and it looks like spiky apples.
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| Photo courtesy of Wikipedia. |
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| Photo courtesy of Wikipedia. |
BAEKSEJU
This is a fermented rice-based alcohol that claims to be a wine, but tastes a bit yeasty for wine. The name literally means "one-hundred-years wine," which refers to its 'legendary' life-lengthening abilities. It claims to have a bunch of herbs and crap that make it healthy.
The story goes like this: A man is walking down the road when he sees a young man, about 20 years old, beating up an 80-year-old man. The traveler stops and yells at the young man for beating up an old guy, but the young man responds, "This is my son! I had him when I was eighty years old! I'm beating him up because he ignored my advice and didn't drink the baekseju, and now he has grown older than me!"
Now, I'm not sure how much of that story is true, but I can tell you this: the stuff ain't bad. I was expecting a lot worse, but I ended up finishing the bottle. And if it's healthy? Sure, sign me up!
CONCLUSIONS
Soju is by far my favorite of the traditional Korean alcohols. It's tasty, dirt cheap, and can double as a sanitizing agent for cleaning. The baekseju comes in second, the fruity wine third, and maesil dead last because it's disgusting.
This concludes the first segment of my review of Korean alcohols, but don't worry, I've got another 6 months here and there's so much more to try! So far I've sent a few juiceboxes of soju back to the States, but nobody has liked them thus far. Your loss, guys, it's delicious! :)
Cheers,
Ashton
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