Hana Makgeolli — Greenpoint, Brooklyn, wedged between an auto body shop and an HVAC repairer, and quietly doing some of the most important fermentation work in America right now. Alice Jun started it as a passion project back in 2015, teamed up with John Limb in 2017, and by 2020 they'd built the country's first artisanal Korean rice wine brewery, launching right into a pandemic and selling out their first two releases. That's not luck, that's people hungry for the real thing.
What gets me is the purity of it. Organic rice, nuruk, water. That's it. Nuruk being the traditional mixed-culture fermentation starter, sourced from Gwangju, and the whole thing brewed through the old three-step samyangju process. No industrial shortcuts, no additives, none of the sweetened, pasteurised commercial stuff most people think of as makgeolli. Alice's own line is that the history and story around sool is "riddled with distractions," and you can taste her cutting straight through them.
The range is properly broad too. Takju 16 is the benchmark, creamy, lactic, grainy, fruit and floral running right through it. Then yakju, the clearer, more structured rice wine, a hwaju, a still soju, and these brilliant botanical releases, ssuk makgeolli with wormwood and perilla from a local farmer, kumquat, omija, honey. Wild, textural, alive in the glass.
And the tasting room is the best part. Communal tables, fresh-from-the-tank pours, house-made anju, bossam braised in makgeolli itself, bottomless sessions on Sundays. Proof that old fermentation traditions can find a brilliant new home on the other side of the world.
Rice wine with a pulse. Get amongst it.
Hana Makgeolli — Greenpoint, Brooklyn, wedged between an auto body shop and an HVAC repairer, and quietly doing some of the most important fermentation work in America right now. Alice Jun started it as a passion project back in 2015, teamed up with John Limb in 2017, and by 2020 they'd built the country's first artisanal Korean rice wine brewery, launching right into a pandemic and selling out their first two releases. That's not luck, that's people hungry for the real thing.
What gets me is the purity of it. Organic rice, nuruk, water. That's it. Nuruk being the traditional mixed-culture fermentation starter, sourced from Gwangju, and the whole thing brewed through the old three-step samyangju process. No industrial shortcuts, no additives, none of the sweetened, pasteurised commercial stuff most people think of as makgeolli. Alice's own line is that the history and story around sool is "riddled with distractions," and you can taste her cutting straight through them.
The range is properly broad too. Takju 16 is the benchmark, creamy, lactic, grainy, fruit and floral running right through it. Then yakju, the clearer, more structured rice wine, a hwaju, a still soju, and these brilliant botanical releases, ssuk makgeolli with wormwood and perilla from a local farmer, kumquat, omija, honey. Wild, textural, alive in the glass.
And the tasting room is the best part. Communal tables, fresh-from-the-tank pours, house-made anju, bossam braised in makgeolli itself, bottomless sessions on Sundays. Proof that old fermentation traditions can find a brilliant new home on the other side of the world.
Rice wine with a pulse. Get amongst it.
