Korea’s oldest alcoholic drink is now being brewed in Chicago.
Yido on the Near West Side specializes in brewing makgeolli, an unfiltered rice wine that’s naturally fermented with a starter culture — similar to kombucha. The drink is often described as being creamy, tart and sweet with fruity notes.
“I feel like Chicago is a city that's like a food and drink city,” Yido Brews founder Peter Quinn Woo Chung said. “It really cares about local craft and artisan creators, and so it just seemed like a big unfilled gap.”
Makgeolli has slowly grown in popularity in the U.S. In South Korea, there are over 760 licensed breweries that produce over 2,000 varieties of the drink. In 2020, Hana Makgeolli opened in New York City – and it was known as the only commercial makgeolli brewery in U.S. at the time. Since then, a handful more have opened across the country, including in California, Maryland and Washington.
In 2013, Slow City in Niles was called the first makgeolli maker in the hemisphere but has since closed.
Without any locally-brewed options, Chung resorted to buying makgeolli at chain supermarkets. But he said he was disappointed with the artificially sweetened options he was finding in stores.
“I looked at the ingredient list, and it was like aspartame and sucralose, and I was just really disappointed because I loved the taste of the makgeolli that I was drinking in Seoul,” Chung said.
Chung was born and grew up in the Chicago area, but he spent a year in Seoul, South Korea, from 2018 to 2019 for a postgraduate fellowship. There, he said he discovered and fell in love with the taste of makgeolli. There’s a tradition in Korea to drink makgeolli on a rainy day with pajeon, or scallion pancakes.
“It's raining so hard that all of the Koreans are buying up all of the makgeolli from the convenience stores, and I was like, ‘Whoa, okay, maybe I should try this,’” Chung said.
Chung and his friends went to a makgeolli bar, and the menu had hundreds of makgeolli options of varying regional varieties, flavors, sweetness and fizziness levels.
When he returned to Chicago, he started experimenting with his brew at home. The steps sound deceptively simple — steam the rice, add it to water, add nuruk, or the starter culture. Then, the mixture ferments. However, there are countless variables that can affect the final outcome like the temperature, ratios of the ingredients and methods of steaming and cooling down the rice.
Chung says he would work on brewing makgeolli whenever he could, even steaming rice during Zoom meetings working as a coordinator for Sierra Club Illinois.
Not every batch was a success at first. Chung said some failed batches had a strong solvent flavor or tasted bitter or sour.
“I would have a batch, and it would fail, and I would get kind of grumpy, and I would be like, ‘Oh, I don't want to do this anymore,’” Chung said. “Then, it'd be like two months later, and be like, All right, let's give it another try. Let me read my notes and see what I did last time, and let's see if I can make it work this time.’”
After about three years of experimentation, he says he perfected a good batch that he could consistently produce.
“Our flagship bottle is called White Tiger,” Chung said. “That one is a little sweet. It has a really nice milkiness, but not being super heavy.”
In July, Chung obtained the physical space for his business. Then, it was a matter of getting prepared for production – waterproofing the floors, getting all the proper licenses, and other tasks. In October, he left his job at Sierra Club Illinois to pursue the brewery full-time.
He landed on a name for the business — Yido — nodding to his Chicago roots. It’s a shortened version of the Korean phrase meaning “Second City.”
Chung said for now, the makgeolli is available for purchase at retailers in Chicago. In the future, he’s hoping to open up a brewpub that serves as a community space.
“One of the feelings that I had a lot in the last seven years since I started homebrewing was, I think someone else is gonna do this,” Chung said. “It came to this point where I was like, no one else is doing this – I guess I'm gonna do this.”
