Y'all distillers gotta learn southeast Asian rice hooch as fuel for your stills. Rice yeast balls, part bacteria part yeast, bacteria breaks down rice starch into a fermentable intermediate then the yeast kicks in. Glutinous rice is cheap when you buy a 40 pound sack. The stuff packaged for the Thai market is most economical. Comes out near 20% abv before it ever hits the copper... a drunkards best friend, solids are a delicacy and liquid tastes like damp bunghole but whoa. Run it through a coil more to clean it up than anything else lol, and the end result is Soju. And I KNOW some of you farts served in Korea. Where every good story starts with, "So there was this one night me n the guys were drinking soju..." ; )
I got learned hard on the how-to by the elderly Vietnamese chick who runs our local trans-world market. Two yeast balls per dry pound of sweet rice that has been overcooked in too much water, unsalted of course, and then cooled to body temperature. Crush the balls, stir into the warm rice mush, cover with a towel, place in oven with pilot light lit for 2 weeks. It turns into something akin to alcoholic rice pudding in booze broth. Drain liquids into a mason jar, charge with white sugar, and stick on the attic stairs next to your kimchi (yes this works best in October at this latitude, and you'd better be making kimchi!!! I'll give you that recipe too, if you like rotten mustard greens as much as I do) Wait another 2 weeks and you've got gnarly semi sparkling rice wine. Mmmm drink up, this ain't no sake. It's some legit farmhouse hooch. Distillation into soju just depends on how you want your night to end: drink as it comes out, you're going to bed in your own home with a pounding headache vs distilled, waking up in an upside down jeep in a wet rice field with an MP asking nicely if he can help dispose of the brick of "herbs " that is now sitting on the headliner because, gravity.
Cheers to the purveyors of ethanol that doesn't taste like the receding floodwaters of a Hot Part hurricane.