A Story Nearly Lost

1909 → 1965 → 1999 | colonial ban · rice ban · revival

For most of the twentieth century, Korea very nearly lost its own drinking heritage, and the story of getting it back is the reason artisanal Sool matters today.

For over a thousand years, brewing in Korea was a household art. Almost every family made its own gayangju (가양주), a house wine handed down through the women of the family, each recipe slightly different from the next. By the Joseon dynasty, hundreds of distinct styles were recorded. Then, in a single century, that whole world was almost erased.

1909 · The home brewing ban

The first blow came with the Liquor Tax Law of 1909, tightened under Japanese colonial rule after 1910. To centralise taxation, home brewing was effectively outlawed and production forced into large licensed factories. Thousands of family recipes, unwritten and passed down by hand, simply disappeared. Anyone who wants to picture that time will find it in the series Pachinko: the heroine secretly brews makgeolli to earn a living in Japan and is jailed for it, because the same colonial law applied in Korea as in Japan. What had been a living folk tradition became a controlled industry almost overnight.

1965 · The rice ban

Liberation did not bring relief. After the devastation of the Korean War, food was scarce, and the Grain Management Act of 1965 banned the use of rice in alcohol altogether. Producers turned to wheat flour and cheap starches, and soju was diluted and sweetened into the cheap green bottle product still seen today. Rice makgeolli was not permitted again until 1976, and a full end to the restrictions took longer still. The ban lasted so long that Sool could no longer be brewed, and barely even learned, as OMYNARA's master Lee Jong Ki recalls in our interview. By the 1980s, artisanal Sool had become a byword for low quality alcohol, and its prestige was nearly gone.

1999 · The keepers of the flame

That the tradition survived at all is owed to a small number of stubborn artisans. From 1985 the government began designating heritage liquors as cultural assets and naming Korea Food Masters (식품명인), custodians charged with preserving specific recipes. Figures such as Park Jae-seo and Jo Ok-hwa in Andong, and Park Heung-seon of Solsongju, rebuilt broken recipes from memory and old texts. When the rice restrictions were finally history in 1999, these keepers became the living bridge back to the pre-colonial craft. The artisanal Sool you drink today is the direct result of their refusal to let the tradition die.