Yakju | The Medicinal Wine

약주 · 藥酒 · "medicinal rice wine" | clarified rice wine · 12 to 20% ABV

Yakju is the clear, refined rice wine that Koreans once considered not just a pleasure but a tonic for body and spirit.

Yakju (약주) joins yak (약, medicine or medicinal herb) with ju (주, 酒, Sool). The literal reading, "medicinal wine", is no metaphor. Koreans long held that properly brewed, high quality fermented alcohol was genuinely good for you, and the Joseon medical encyclopaedia Dongui Bogam (동의보감, 1613) documented the healing properties of specific Sool and the herbs that could be infused into them.

The drink of the aristocracy

In the Joseon hierarchy, yakju sat at the top tier of brewing. Clear where makgeolli was cloudy, it required more grain, more nuruk, more skill and more time, and it was the drink of the yangban scholar-noble class and the royal court. To serve fine yakju was a mark of status and hospitality; to be offered it was a mark of respect. For the yangban this was not only pleasure: they drank good yakju for their health as well.

Endlessly personal

Yakju's defining feature is infusion. Medicinal herbs, flower petals, seasonal botanicals or aged ingredients could be added during fermentation, so every noble household kept its own recipe, guarded and handed down for generations. This is why Europeans sometimes describe fine yakju as a kind of Korean vermouth, a clarified rice wine layered with wild herbs, mushrooms, pear, cinnamon or mandarin. That diversity is deeply regional, because Korean yakju usually reaches for the specialties of its own area, and that is exactly what our partners show: NaeKook in Nonsan infuses wild pine-forest mushrooms, above all the songi (matsutake) that grows only under old red pines and gives the yakju an earthy, resinous depth; Wangju, also in Nonsan, works with chrysanthemum, goji berry and pine needle into a bouquet you "drink first with the nose"; and Solsongju at the foot of Jirisan captures the freshness and resin scent of the young spring pine sprout (songsun). The hundreds of yakju variants in old texts represent a lost world of diversity that today's artisans are working to restore.

A note on the law

Confusingly, yakju and cheongju overlap. Under current Korean law, yakju means clarified Sool made with nuruk, while cheongju refers to the sake-style clear rice wine, a distinction rooted in colonial history rather than taste. In the glass, yakju is Korea's refined, aromatic, subtly medicinal clear rice wine.