Gamhyangju (Sweet-Fragrance Wine)

History

Gamhyangju (감향주, 甘香酒 — roughly "sweet-fragrance wine") is a sweet Korean rice wine prized for a honey-like sweetness and fragrance. It belongs to the danyangju class of single-stage brews, fermented in one step rather than repeatedly refreshed. Its sweetness comes from a heavy reliance on glutinous rice and from using only a little water, since holding the water back concentrates both sweetness and fragrance; in this it resembles the closely related ihwaju, which uses no water at all. The wine was a long-established banquet drink, recorded across at least half a dozen Joseon recipe books — among them Yorok, Gyugon yoram, Gyuhap chongseo, and Yangjubang — with as many as eight documented method variants, all converging on the same sweet, fragrant result. Jang Gye-hyang's Eumsik dimibang (음식디미방, c.1670), the oldest surviving Korean-language cookbook, gives one of these early recorded methods. Its version grinds nonglutinous rice into a holed rice-cake that is boiled, cooled, and mixed with nuruk to build a starter, then folded warm into steamed glutinous rice and left to ripen in a well-wrapped, heated jar. As a mid-Joseon wine it carries no New-World ingredients — only rice, nuruk, and water — and sits within the book's unusually large corpus of roughly fifty fermented-drink recipes.

Ingredients

• doe non-glutinous rice (base)
• sabal (bowl) boiling water
• doe nuruk
• mal glutinous rice (main)

Instructions

1. Wash 1 doe non-glutinous rice clear, grind, make holed rice cakes, boil thoroughly and cool.
2. Mix 1 bowl of the boiling water with 1 doe nuruk and the cakes, knead, and pack into a well-fired jar (this is the base brew).
3. Wash 1 mal glutinous rice clear and set to soak the same day; after 3 days steam thoroughly.
4. Before the steamed rice cools, mix in the base brew and pack into a jar; wrap the jar well in a warm room and use when ripe.
5. For a sharper taste, leave the jar unwrapped in a cool place. Scale up the method to brew larger amounts.