South Korea

Korea ferments with nuruk, a cake of crushed wheat or rice left open to whatever wild yeasts and moulds settle on it. It is a wilder and far less controlled starter than the cultivated koji used in Japan, and it is what gives makgeolli, the cloudy unfiltered rice wine that predates everything else on this shelf, its sourness.

Distilling arrived in the thirteenth century with the Mongol campaigns, carried east from Persia, and the garrison towns of Kaesong, Andong and Jeju became the centres of it. Around Kaesong the drink is still sometimes called arak-ju, which keeps the Arabic root of the word intact. The scarcity here has one specific cause: in 1965, with rice short, distilling soju from grain was banned outright and the industry moved to diluted ethanol. The ban was not fully lifted until 1999, so grain soju from before it, and the regional rice wines that survived alongside it, are genuinely difficult to find.