Hyangonju

History

Hyangonju (향온주, 香醞酒) was one of the Joseon court's signature wines — its name marks it as a "fragrant" royal drink brewed inside the palace rather than gathered as tribute. It was produced under royal supervision at the Yangonseo (양온서) brewing office and, after that office lapsed, at the Naeuiwon (內醫院), the palace medical bureau. What set it apart was its nuruk (fermentation starter): unlike ordinary wheat starters, hyangonju used a distinctive malt built with ground mung bean (녹두) alongside grain, giving the wine its characteristic aroma. Eumsik dimibang's own recipe opens exactly there, directing that the starter be made from coarsely ground wheat, left unsifted, mixed with a measure of ground mung bean before steamed white and glutinous rice are combined with boiled water. At court the king and queen drank hyangonju with meals and as a restorative, and the throne bestowed it on high officials at weddings and sixtieth-birthday feasts. Aristocratic families who received these gifts took up brewing their own versions, carrying the court wine beyond the palace walls — the same path by which a Gyeongsang yangban kitchen like Jang Gye-hyang's came to record it around 1670. It sits within the book's unusually large drinks corpus of roughly fifty wine recipes, and its pungency, like everything in this pre-chili manuscript, comes from grain and mung bean alone.

Ingredients

• mal per loaf wheat (for the nuruk)
• hop per loaf ground mung bean (for the nuruk)
• mal white rice
• mal glutinous rice
• byeong (bottle) hot water
• nuruk
• byeong (bottle) fermentation-starter liquid (seogim)

Instructions

1. Nuruk: grind wheat coarsely without sifting; per loaf use 1 mal, mixing in 1 hop ground mung bean (nokdu), and form the loaves.
2. Wash 10 mal white rice and 1 mal glutinous rice clear and steam them.
3. Mix in 15 bottles of hot water; when it is all absorbed, spread on a mat and cool a long while.
4. Mix in 1 mal 5 doe nuruk and 1 bottle of fermentation-starter liquid (seogim), and brew.