This soju changed course mid-distillation because it was too good. The plan was a pot still followed by a column still, but what came off the pot still tasted cool and sweet-salty, with notes of tarragon and shiso, so the team dropped the second pass. Instead they made a tighter hearts cut, ran the still more slowly and bottled a single-pass pot distillate. The distiller admits that's uncommon, and that it leaves the spirit wilder: funkier, grassier, earthier. If you think of soju as a neutral green-bottle shot, this is a very different animal. It's a collaboration between Matchbook Distilling Co. and Alice Jun's Hana Makgeolli in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, the first Korean rice wine brewery in New York ("Hana" is Jun's Korean birth name). The base is organic rice and nuruk given a 100-day, three-stage samyangju fermentation, and after distillation a pinch each of salt and sugar goes in to bring out the salty-sweet interplay. At 20% ABV it's table strength, and the distiller says it drinks almost like a rice-wine vermouth: mix it 50/50 with dry vermouth for a lower-proof martini, or pour it over ice with sparkling water for a highball.