This time I brought back some beer from the airport too. The duty free shops have gotten so much better.. or rather, they’ve just gone back to how they used to be..
The Premium Malt’s Kaoru Ale, Blessings of the Sapphire Hop
Apparently it’s brewed with Sapphire hops.. tastes pretty good..
SORACHI 1984, the Legendary Hop
Wait, a beer like this at the airport? There was no way I wasn’t buying it..
Tanqueray
This one is far tastier than the higher-end model.
Smirnoff Ice Green Apple
Surprisingly decent?
Ginseng liquor
I got fired up watching Hometown Cha-Cha-Cha and gave it a go.. but it doesn’t taste all that good.. You’re supposed to buy good ingredients and I didn’t, and I just used whatever booze was lying around.. More importantly, I didn’t understand the character of the ingredients themselves. There’s no way it was going to turn out well.. (There’s a reason Chief Hong is so popular..)
Gangju
I bought it because people say it’s good for infusing — it’s a 50% diluted-type soju. Outstanding value, and for a soju it tastes fine too. It has a touch of sweetness to it, which makes it well suited to making fruit liqueurs.
Andong Soju
This is the standard-bearer for rice-based distilled soju, and it’s good just to drink as it is. Unlike the diluted type, it has a mellow aroma and a deep, lingering flavour. It’s cheap because it’s the value size, and at this level this price is probably one of a kind.. Put it in a fancy bottle and the price jumps, so buying this size and decanting into a small bottle when you drink is one way to go. Not that I’ll ever bother going that far.. This time I bought it to steep some pricier ingredients..
Filter
Never thought the day would come when I, someone who doesn’t even drink coffee, would buy a filter.. I used it to strain the sediment out of my infused liquor. You have to use one of these for the flavour to turn out smooth.
Ginseng liquor 2
I got hold of somewhat better ingredients, so I steeped a second batch. Well.. it looks like I put in way too much. I didn’t know back then.. I just assumed more was better, but most ingredients have a good flavour and a bad flavour in them, and if you add too much, both come out too strongly — and however much better the good flavour gets, chances are the bad one ends up standing out. I should have struck the right balance, but there’s no way a first-timer would know that.. Anyway.. so it seems best to add the bare minimum and test as you put in a little more at a time, except that I don’t have the time and the window when good ingredients are around is short..
Pineapple liquor, apple liquor
The apple one was at least drinkable, but pineapple doesn’t seem to suit infusing.
Nikka Coffey Gin
It’s distilled in a Coffey still (not the black coffee kind..) and it’s supposed to be a gin with a lovely aroma.. well, I can’t really tell about that sort of thing.. I think the vodka is a bit better.
Quince liquor
I crammed in far too much fruit.. In the end it was a failure, but.. I’d thrown in some slightly underripe quince, and around day three it tasted uncannily good. There was a hint of bitterness, and sweetness coming up underneath. It felt a bit like drinking a gimlet. That was actually the moment the quince liquor was finished, but I waited three months to drink it and the balance had completely fallen apart.. (When I tasted it on day three I thought — this good after three days of ageing?! Imagine how good it’ll be after three months! .. Turns out that’s not how it works..) Anyway, I learned a lot..
Yagwanmun (Chinese bush clover) tea
Yagwanmun, which they say is good for male vitality.. honestly.. there’s no way a common weed growing by the roadside has that kind of effect. Apparently it used to be widely used as cattle fodder. But having drunk it, it does seem to bring down the heat in your body. Korean medicine doctors say the same thing on YouTube.. So drinking it as a tea or a liquor lowers your stress levels. In herbal medicine there are supposedly better remedies than this.. but yagwanmun is dirt cheap. Buy one bag and it lasts you a long time.. If you have a high-stress job or personality, taking it long term seems like a fine idea. It probably suits women better than men.. and the consensus is that the liquor works better still. (Though.. hoping your vitality improves while you’re drinking booze — does that even add up..)
Yagwanmun liquor..
Yagwanmun doesn’t taste good (more precisely, it tastes of grass), so you need to lay sweet dried jujubes at the bottom. It gives a nice colour too. I put in too much yagwanmun.. one or two weeks seems to be plenty for the flavour to come out.. but I think I let it steep for about a month. You really don’t need to put in this much.. I’d ordered yagwanmun from all over to test it out.. and since I had no idea how much 300 grams actually is.. it turns out under 600 grams is enough to fill 4.5 litres.. In the end, even after using it all up making liquor, I had loads left over, and now I have no idea when I’ll ever get through it.. The result does taste of grass, but it’s still drinkable, and my stress levels really did come down. I suspect that’s where the talk about it being good for your vitality comes from. After all, not getting it up is more often mental than physical..
Fireball
A sweet, cinnamon-spiked party whisky. For how ridiculously cheap it is, you barely taste any off-flavours. That must be why it was such a huge hit in the States. Honestly, for young people cheap and plentiful is all that matters, and if it tastes decent on top of that, of course it’s going to be popular. Don’t go expecting anything mind-blowing here.. just take it as something that’s good for a party.
Kirkland London Dry Gin
The bottle was so big it was a chore to get through.. and the flavour turned out not to be what I’m after.. Of the Kirkland line I’ve tried so far, only the French vodka was any good. There are a few other well-reviewed whiskies too, of course, but the bottles are so huge that even the French vodka is a slog to finish..
Deodeok liquor
This one is really something.. deodeok is normally a bit bitter, but one-year-old deodeok has no bitterness at all and is full of a fresh, makgeolli-like aroma. It takes about three years for them to get big enough to be easy to prep, and the deodeok liquor made from those has its own pleasant bitter depth, but liquor from young deodeok can be drunk just a few days after you make it and the aroma is so intense that I found it wildly appealing. The one problem is that first-year deodeok straight from the soil is so tiny that cleaning them one by one is unbelievably brutal.. it’s pure hard labour. Buying the medium size is probably a reasonable compromise. I’ve tried infusing all sorts of things, and three-day quince liquor and young deodeok liquor seem the best of the lot, since even a beginner can make them and you get to drink them right away.
Hwanggeumhyang citrus liquor
Citrus like this turned out to be tricky to make. The flavour is in the juice and the aroma is in the peel, and if you don’t handle those separately and just steep the whole thing, all kinds of off-flavours creep in..
Grapefruit and lemon liquor
This one was a failure too
Medicinal doraji (balloon flower root) liquor
Doraji tastes somewhere between deodeok and ginseng.. I steeped it in Andong Soju. I can’t really tell what it tastes like.. it’s purely ornamental.
Three-year-old deodeok liquor
I can’t tell what this one tastes like either, so it’s purely ornamental.. Infusing jars bulge slightly at the top so the contents look bigger and show up nicely. It has nothing to do with the taste..
Damun
It’s a tasty makgeolli, and I bought it because I heard you can order it online. There are a lot of good things about traditional liquor being sold this way.
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