Writing style is a bit annoying but a really fascinating look at how the craft beer market is finally starting to really take off in Korea, especially among women:
http://munchies.vice.com/articles/w...reas-craft-beer-movement?utm_source=hootsuite
The article's right, the craft beer bar crowd here in Korea is well over half female. If you look around at the crowd at a brewpub it's couples on dates, many groups of 2-5 fashionable women and a few lonely tables of 2-3 men in business suits, with maybe a sprinkling of hairy foreigners.
Until very recently it was basically illegal to open a microbrewery in Korea. You had to have a very high minimum annual production to distribute your beer and that was such a high barrier to entry that the old piss-beer duopoly stayed dominant until very recently. Then imports started to steadily erode the Korean beer market share and to provide some local competition against the imports the beer laws were finally reformed and it got made much easier to open a brewery (in 2014 IIRC).
While it's still really hard to find good beer on store shelves there's a lot of microbrewery start-ups and a massive explosion of craft beer bars, especially in Gangnam and the other rich areas of Seoul.
Short history of Korean drinking:
-In the old days the dominant drink was makgeolli, a cloudy yeasty lacto rice beer that farmers usually made themselves. Just like with farmhouse beers there was a massive diversity in recipes and ingredients with it generally being drunk fresh while there was still a bit of residual sweetness. Nice refreshing stuff once you've developed a taste for it.
-Then Korea started to industrialize and people moved to cities for work. Makgeolli wasn't really well suited to serve to the new working class as traditionally it's drunk quite fresh. So instead you had soju. Basically imagine the worst vodka you've ever had and then mix it 50/50 with sugar water. Dirt cheap, easy to take shots with and it'll get ya drunk. Still the dominant drink among post-Korean War baby boom guys and they drink a LOT. My in-laws down at the farm buy the high proof version in 3 liter plastic jugs.
-Then a lot of the next generation (Gen X loosely) starts getting turned off by drinking stuff that tastes like nail polish remover and starts drinking more and more light lager. Having zero flavor is a massive step up from soju so this catches on fast. The government sees it as a luxury and taxes the hell out of it (there's a joke in Korea that drinking beer is more patriotic than serving in the military and drinking beer PAYS for the military) but people drink it anyway. They drink soju too (especially with seafood) or do soju bombs. Rich men who want to show off drink expensive Scotch (generally in the form of boilermakers (weep for the poor aged single malt Scotch that gets mixed with ****ing Cass and gulped down in one go). There's some imported German and Japanese lagers but not much ****ing else. Often the very best stuff you could find in a big store was Guiness or Leffe Brown.
-Then the 2002 World Cup comes along and people start thinking about maybe serving something that'll appeal to the tourists. At this time a whole ****-ton of German-style beer halls open.
-The ****-ton of German-style brewpub beer halls start hemorrhaging cash rapidly. The problem with German beer (and Japanese too) is if you're trying to get people to pay MUCH more than they pay for Korean beer it's a lot easier to justify that high price if the expensive beer tastes really really different. And a mediocre brewpub helles really doesn't taste that different from a light lager while even the crappiest microbrew pale ale will at least have a flavor you're not used to. These places' main clientele was rich businessmen who mostly drift back to their old haunts to do terrible things to expensive Scotch.
-Around this time wine starts to establish itself. I remember when I first got to Korea in 2003 laughing my ass off at a shelf of Manischewitz. Things have gotten better now with Chilean cabernet sauvignon dominating (the FTA helps keep the prices somewhat reasonable). Most random non-Chilean wine costs double what it would cost in the states, unless you hit one of the clearance sales. These days all big stores have a passable wine section, while a lot still don't have any premium beer except for mass market European/Japanese stuff (Sapporo, Hoegaarden, Pilsner Urquell, etc.).
-Being burned by German beer you get some brewpubs flailing around and making crappy American-style beer instead. You know the stuff. It's the kind of brewpub you get in tourist hot spots with fancy menus and inoffensive overpriced beer. For some reason this crap never catches on and these brewpubs are hurt by not being allowed to distribute. Annoyingly the craft beer that's easiest to find in stores these days is the rebranded survivor of this second wave of craft beer and it's very mediocre.
-There's a few weird flashes in the pan. Fruit syrup in beer! Mixing tiny amounts of Cooper's Stout with Korean beer and selling it as dark beer (owner was very confused when I actually wanted to drink the stout straight). None of these really pan out.
-Slowly slowly imports with actual flavor start trickling in with Belgians taking the lead and American craft beer just showing up (at ruinous prices) within the last few years. This finally goads the government into action...
-Then FINALLY the damn beer distribution laws get relaxed last year and you get a whole lot of start ups. Huge numbers of tap houses, brew pubs, microbrew-branded bars and self service bars are opening up all over the place, at least in the richer bits of Seoul. One new trend is the self service bar where there's a few fridges full of beer and you pick out and open your own and then bring you empties and pay when you leave. The quality of these places varies enormously from "****ty light lager from Italy, Spain, Laos, AND Thailand!" to the full Ballast Point lineup.
We even have a few bull**** crafty beers from the big boys. These all suck except one that tastes like a pretty decent English bitter.
As the article points out this new explosion of craft beer is really female led. It's new, "sophisticated" and trendy so it brings in the Sex and the City crowd.
What's interesting is that despite what the article says about lots of sweet fruity drinks to appeal to women the beer lineup that these yuppy women are loving really isn't that much different from your standard West Coast microbrewery, sure there aren't the extreme double IPAs or RIS but the sort of beers I see most often are either malty hope forward pale ales or session IPAs (or pale ales that are dry and bitter enough to taste just like session IPAs). Belgian beer is also popular, especially the imports. The microbrew Belgian stuff here is pretty mediocre since the expertise is all in the California tradition and the fumble around a lot when out of their pale ale comfort zone. There's a real market niche here for a high quality Belgian-style brewery that nobody's filling.
I know a guy who works at a brewpub who says that basically their WHOLE lineup is fruit beers, but it's just not something I see that much. Maybe I need to get out more, it's hard to justify paying so much for craft beer when I can make my own.
I know in the states there's a lot of hand-wringing about getting more female craft beer customers and I really don't think the problem is flavor. Trendy women here in Korea love hop-forward pale ales (and think historically, people didn't jump right into triple IPAs, they had SNPA getting people interested in American hops first and SNPA would fit riiiiiiight in with what I'm seeing in Korea these days and I'll take a malty pale ale with 25 IBUs with a nice big late hop addition over a bone dry 90 IBU IPA where all you can taste is the bittering charge any day), I think the thing holding them back in the states is more the image and the culture more than anything. Same thing with mild, from what I know you pretty much never get young women drinking it in the UK while my homebrew mild was a massive hit among my wife's friends, far far far more than the more traditional craft brew chick drink of wheat beer.
http://munchies.vice.com/articles/w...reas-craft-beer-movement?utm_source=hootsuite
The article's right, the craft beer bar crowd here in Korea is well over half female. If you look around at the crowd at a brewpub it's couples on dates, many groups of 2-5 fashionable women and a few lonely tables of 2-3 men in business suits, with maybe a sprinkling of hairy foreigners.
Until very recently it was basically illegal to open a microbrewery in Korea. You had to have a very high minimum annual production to distribute your beer and that was such a high barrier to entry that the old piss-beer duopoly stayed dominant until very recently. Then imports started to steadily erode the Korean beer market share and to provide some local competition against the imports the beer laws were finally reformed and it got made much easier to open a brewery (in 2014 IIRC).
While it's still really hard to find good beer on store shelves there's a lot of microbrewery start-ups and a massive explosion of craft beer bars, especially in Gangnam and the other rich areas of Seoul.
Short history of Korean drinking:
-In the old days the dominant drink was makgeolli, a cloudy yeasty lacto rice beer that farmers usually made themselves. Just like with farmhouse beers there was a massive diversity in recipes and ingredients with it generally being drunk fresh while there was still a bit of residual sweetness. Nice refreshing stuff once you've developed a taste for it.
-Then Korea started to industrialize and people moved to cities for work. Makgeolli wasn't really well suited to serve to the new working class as traditionally it's drunk quite fresh. So instead you had soju. Basically imagine the worst vodka you've ever had and then mix it 50/50 with sugar water. Dirt cheap, easy to take shots with and it'll get ya drunk. Still the dominant drink among post-Korean War baby boom guys and they drink a LOT. My in-laws down at the farm buy the high proof version in 3 liter plastic jugs.
-Then a lot of the next generation (Gen X loosely) starts getting turned off by drinking stuff that tastes like nail polish remover and starts drinking more and more light lager. Having zero flavor is a massive step up from soju so this catches on fast. The government sees it as a luxury and taxes the hell out of it (there's a joke in Korea that drinking beer is more patriotic than serving in the military and drinking beer PAYS for the military) but people drink it anyway. They drink soju too (especially with seafood) or do soju bombs. Rich men who want to show off drink expensive Scotch (generally in the form of boilermakers (weep for the poor aged single malt Scotch that gets mixed with ****ing Cass and gulped down in one go). There's some imported German and Japanese lagers but not much ****ing else. Often the very best stuff you could find in a big store was Guiness or Leffe Brown.
-Then the 2002 World Cup comes along and people start thinking about maybe serving something that'll appeal to the tourists. At this time a whole ****-ton of German-style beer halls open.
-The ****-ton of German-style brewpub beer halls start hemorrhaging cash rapidly. The problem with German beer (and Japanese too) is if you're trying to get people to pay MUCH more than they pay for Korean beer it's a lot easier to justify that high price if the expensive beer tastes really really different. And a mediocre brewpub helles really doesn't taste that different from a light lager while even the crappiest microbrew pale ale will at least have a flavor you're not used to. These places' main clientele was rich businessmen who mostly drift back to their old haunts to do terrible things to expensive Scotch.
-Around this time wine starts to establish itself. I remember when I first got to Korea in 2003 laughing my ass off at a shelf of Manischewitz. Things have gotten better now with Chilean cabernet sauvignon dominating (the FTA helps keep the prices somewhat reasonable). Most random non-Chilean wine costs double what it would cost in the states, unless you hit one of the clearance sales. These days all big stores have a passable wine section, while a lot still don't have any premium beer except for mass market European/Japanese stuff (Sapporo, Hoegaarden, Pilsner Urquell, etc.).
-Being burned by German beer you get some brewpubs flailing around and making crappy American-style beer instead. You know the stuff. It's the kind of brewpub you get in tourist hot spots with fancy menus and inoffensive overpriced beer. For some reason this crap never catches on and these brewpubs are hurt by not being allowed to distribute. Annoyingly the craft beer that's easiest to find in stores these days is the rebranded survivor of this second wave of craft beer and it's very mediocre.
-There's a few weird flashes in the pan. Fruit syrup in beer! Mixing tiny amounts of Cooper's Stout with Korean beer and selling it as dark beer (owner was very confused when I actually wanted to drink the stout straight). None of these really pan out.
-Slowly slowly imports with actual flavor start trickling in with Belgians taking the lead and American craft beer just showing up (at ruinous prices) within the last few years. This finally goads the government into action...
-Then FINALLY the damn beer distribution laws get relaxed last year and you get a whole lot of start ups. Huge numbers of tap houses, brew pubs, microbrew-branded bars and self service bars are opening up all over the place, at least in the richer bits of Seoul. One new trend is the self service bar where there's a few fridges full of beer and you pick out and open your own and then bring you empties and pay when you leave. The quality of these places varies enormously from "****ty light lager from Italy, Spain, Laos, AND Thailand!" to the full Ballast Point lineup.
We even have a few bull**** crafty beers from the big boys. These all suck except one that tastes like a pretty decent English bitter.
As the article points out this new explosion of craft beer is really female led. It's new, "sophisticated" and trendy so it brings in the Sex and the City crowd.
What's interesting is that despite what the article says about lots of sweet fruity drinks to appeal to women the beer lineup that these yuppy women are loving really isn't that much different from your standard West Coast microbrewery, sure there aren't the extreme double IPAs or RIS but the sort of beers I see most often are either malty hope forward pale ales or session IPAs (or pale ales that are dry and bitter enough to taste just like session IPAs). Belgian beer is also popular, especially the imports. The microbrew Belgian stuff here is pretty mediocre since the expertise is all in the California tradition and the fumble around a lot when out of their pale ale comfort zone. There's a real market niche here for a high quality Belgian-style brewery that nobody's filling.
I know a guy who works at a brewpub who says that basically their WHOLE lineup is fruit beers, but it's just not something I see that much. Maybe I need to get out more, it's hard to justify paying so much for craft beer when I can make my own.
I know in the states there's a lot of hand-wringing about getting more female craft beer customers and I really don't think the problem is flavor. Trendy women here in Korea love hop-forward pale ales (and think historically, people didn't jump right into triple IPAs, they had SNPA getting people interested in American hops first and SNPA would fit riiiiiiight in with what I'm seeing in Korea these days and I'll take a malty pale ale with 25 IBUs with a nice big late hop addition over a bone dry 90 IBU IPA where all you can taste is the bittering charge any day), I think the thing holding them back in the states is more the image and the culture more than anything. Same thing with mild, from what I know you pretty much never get young women drinking it in the UK while my homebrew mild was a massive hit among my wife's friends, far far far more than the more traditional craft brew chick drink of wheat beer.
