Breeze and Stream

How It Began

Breeze and Stream is a distillery that opened in 2023 in Inje, Gangwon. Its official corporate name is Breeze and Stream Agricultural Company, LLC. Its CEO is Nam Gu-hyeong.

Nam worked in overseas sales for a long time. He said that traveling to many countries, he naturally came to know each country's liquor. He wanted to introduce good Korean liquor abroad, but makgeolli was hard to take overseas, so he chose distilled spirits. He resolved to make a premium Korean soju, a liquor to drink and enjoy rather than one just for getting drunk.

The name means a distillery located in Inje, where the clear air of Seoraksan (Breeze, 風) and the clean water of the Naerincheon stream (Stream, 流) flow. Put together, the two characters make pungnyu (風流), the Korean notion of refined, elegant pleasure. The bottle label carries this meaning with a picture of a seonbi (scholar) drinking in a boat floating on a stream.

How the Liquor Is Made

Breeze and Stream roasts its grain before use, because roasted ingredients give the liquor a nutty aroma. For distillation, it uses a copper pot still, which is better suited to extracting flavor compounds, rather than a column still. For aging, it uses jars from Yundoori Gongbang, the same jars used for One Spirits' Won Soju and Dameulsul Gongbang's Juhyang.

The ingredients of the rice vodka Shore RED are glutinous rice and rice, house-made rice nuruk, yeast from the Korea Food Research Institute, and purified water. The liquor is filtered through birch charcoal for a clean taste. Cheongyang chili is then added for a distinctive flavor.

Signature Liquors and Lineage

Burnt Barley 25 is a barley soju made by roasting new-crop barley from Yangyang. It is presented as Korea's first roasted barley soju. Burnt Buckwheat 40 is a buckwheat soju made by roasting new-crop buckwheat from Chuncheon. What the two share is that both use roasted grain.

Shore RED is a vodka made from rice. Its defining feature is the addition of Cheongyang chili. It was followed by Shore Gold, an oak-aged version of the rice vodka. There is also Namul Gin, a Korean-style gin made with wild mountain greens (sannamul).

Recognition

Burnt Buckwheat 40 won a gold medal at the 2023 San Francisco World Spirits Competition (SFWSC). The following year, Burnt Barley 25 won a silver medal at the 2024 SFWSC. Nam said that, taking the two consecutive years of awards as a turning point, he would work to promote Gangwon Province and Inje-gun and to make traditional Korean liquor more premium and global.

In 2025 it ranked first overall (Super Platinum) at the K-Sool Trend Awards. In 2026 it won the grand prize at Rising Spirits Korea. Its record of awards continues every year from 2023 to 2026.