The untold story of South Korean beer

By Yun Suh-young

There had been a huge debate about the taste of Korean beers a couple of years back, sparked by a British journalist residing in Korea who wrote a column about how bad South Korean beer tasted and that he’d rather drink a North Korean one over it. Many agreed saying South Korean beers didn’t really have any “taste” and some even denounced that they tasted like urine, while others were infuriated by the comment and offended by a foreigner taking a lash at local beers.

Interestingly, that journalist ended up opening his own craft beer pub (and is no longer a journalist) which has become quite popular. Whether inspired by the beer brouhaha or not, it was around this time in 2012, when the beer column was published, that the local craft beer scenery began to wriggle. Craft beer breweries began to multiply around 2010 but it wasn’t until a few years later that craft beers truly caught on with consumers.

It’s difficult to say which came first whether the craft beer movement was already in place and that journalist pinpointed it, or whether the column had actually stimulated beer experts to provide quality beers that were personally brewed. Whatever the answer is to this chicken-or-egg debate, the environment was ripe for craft beer to flourish here. Hence began the craft beer fever. 

Craft beer 101