Samhaeju (Three-Pig-Day Wine), Twenty-Mal Batch

History

Samhaeju (三亥酒, "three-Pig-day wine") is one of the most celebrated rice wines of Joseon Korea, and Jang Gye-hyang's c.1670 Eumsik dimibang — the oldest surviving Korean-language cookbook, carrying its largest single block of drink recipes — is an early vernacular witness to it. The name records the method: brewing begins on the first 해일 (hae-il, "Pig day") of the first lunar month and is built up in successive mashes on the following Pig days, a thrice-added (삼양주) fermentation. The manuscript's own instruction follows exactly this pattern, mounting rice and nuruk in three stages across the early Pig days. Because the mash then rests through the cold late-winter months in a long, slow low-temperature fermentation of roughly a hundred days — earning the alternate name baegilju ("hundred-day wine") — it matured into a spring drink. Samhaeju was above all a specialty of Hanyang (Seoul) and is described as the most frequently recorded liquor of the Joseon era, prized among the yangban and at court.

Ingredients

• mal white rice (first Pig day)
• sabal (bowl) boiled water (first Pig day)
• doe good nuruk
• doe fine wheat flour
• mal white rice (second Pig day)
• sabal (bowl) boiled water (second Pig day)
• mal white rice (third Pig day)

Instructions

1. On the first Pig (Hae) day of the first month: wash 3 mal of white rice clear, grind to flour, make porridge with 9 bowls of boiled water; when fully cooled, mix in 7 doe good nuruk and 3 doe fine wheat flour and pack into the crock.
2. On the second Pig day: wash 4 mal of white rice clear, grind, make porridge with 12 bowls of boiled water, cool fully, and add to the crock.
3. On the third Pig day: wash 13 mal of white rice clear, steam whole until very soft, cool fully, and mix into the earlier brew.
4. When it ripens, use it.