Ogapi-ju (Acanthopanax Wine)

History

Ogapiju is a medicinal rice wine infused with the bark of ogapi (오가피, Acanthopanax / Eleutherococcus), a thorny Araliaceae shrub long prized in Korean and Chinese materia medica as a "second ginseng." Eumsik dimibang records it among the roughly fifty-one alcoholic-drink recipes that make up nearly a third of the book — an unusually deep 17th-century fermentation corpus. In the manuscript's own method the bark is peeled and chopped, dried in the sun, then brewed in a pouch set at the bottom of the jar with milled-rice porridge and nuruk (no chili or other New-World ingredient, consistent with the pre-1670 Korean pantry). The recipe is inseparable from its medicinal reputation. Ogapi was a documented tonic herb: the Donguibogam holds that long use "makes the body light," and it was traditionally taken for wind-damp joint pain, numbness and weakened limbs, while the Ming herbalist Li Shizhen is quoted prizing a handful of it above a cartload of gold. The wine's own text then carries a longevity legend — recorded here strictly as folklore of the tradition, not as fact or health advice: it tells of an elder who drank ogapiju all his life, reached a fabulous age and fathered dozens of sons, urging the reader to drink it against sickness and short life. Such vitality lore was integral to how the period understood the drink, preserved as belief rather than endorsed as medicine.

Ingredients

• mal ogapi (acanthopanax bark)
• mal white rice
• doe nuruk

Instructions

1. Peel ogapi bark when the sap rises, remove the outer bark, slice with a knife, and sun-dry.
2. For a 5-mal brew, put 1 mal of sliced ogapi in a bag at the bottom of the jar.
3. Wash and grind 5 mal of white rice, make a porridge, and when cool mix in 5 doe of nuruk and add to the jar.
4. When fermented, drink on an empty stomach; said to treat wind ailments and numbness, with a longevity legend attached.