Gwaha-ju (Summer-Passing Wine)

History

Gwaha-ju (과하주, 過夏酒) is a fortified Korean rice wine whose name means roughly "wine that passes through summer" — a brew built to keep its flavor through the hot, humid Korean summer by raising its alcohol content. It is made by adding distilled soju to a rice-wine ferment, a technique that parallels how European fortified wines resist spoilage. Jang Gye-hyang's Eumsik dimibang (음식디미방, c.1670), the oldest surviving Korean-language cookbook, is widely cited as holding the earliest recorded recipe for the fortified form of gwaha-ju. The name itself is older: an unfortified "gwaha-baekju" appears in the mid-15th-century Sanga Yorok, so the 1670 book is best read as an early witness to the fortification method rather than the drink's beginning. Its own method steeps nuruk (fermentation starter) in cooled boiled water overnight, strains it, and mixes the liquor with thoroughly steamed glutinous rice; after about three days of primary fermentation, good soju is poured in and the wine rests seven more days before drinking. Gwaha-ju sits within the book's unusually large drinks corpus — roughly 51 alcoholic-beverage entries, about a third of the manuscript — reflecting the fermenting and liquor-brewing central to a 17th-century Gyeongsang yangban household's kitchen. As a mid-Joseon wine it carries no New-World ingredients: its character comes only from rice, nuruk, and distilled spirit.

Ingredients

• doe nuruk
• byeong (bottle) boiling water
• mal glutinous rice
• good soju

Instructions

1. Pour 1 bottle of cooled boiling water over 2 doe nuruk and leave overnight.
2. Knead the clear top, strain through a sieve, add cooled water, strain again, and discard the dregs.
3. Wash and steam 1 mal of glutinous rice very well; when cool, mix with the nuruk water and put away.
4. After three days, pour in about ten bokja of good soju (source figure damaged); it turns strong and sweet. Use after seven days.