A Brewing Revolution? I had originally planned to write about the presidential elections in South
Korea and America, but I find the frontrunners in both countries, Lee
Myung-bak and Hillary Clinton, to be so utterly uninspiring that I have
decided to focus on a less weighty (but weight-inducing) issue: Great beer
and the paucity thereof in Korea. Korea experienced a coffee revolution
more than a decade ago when folks realized that you could do better than
instant coffee. Yet, when it comes to beer, only a handful are fighting the
good fight. Koreans can be forgiven for not knowing what good beer is
because the mega breweries make loads of money selling their most bland and
bitter beers to the world. The path to beer enlightenment starts with a
simple rule that I have: If it is the color of urine, don't drink it!
Beers that are white, amber, brown or black tend to be vastly more
flavorful. If you look hard, you can find such beers in Korea.
The problem with yellow beers is that they tend to be bland or bitter. This
might fit the bill on an especially hot day, but not the rest of the year.
The difference between Coke and Pepsi is far greater than the difference
between Budweiser, Hite, Asahi, Corona, Heineken, or even my family beer,
Beck's. I challenge you to put on a blindfold and be able to tell the
difference. Beck's happens to be the leading beer exported from Germany,
the beer capital of the world. This stems from the fact that Germans
overwhelmingly drink pilsner (yellow beer). For most Germans, northerners
in particular, beer should be bitter. Mass-produced American beer tends to
be bland, containing less appropriate grains like rice and going through a
pasteurization process that kills much of a beer's flavor. One of the
founders of the micrebrewing movement in the U.S. is Jim Koch, who in 1985
appropriately named his beer after an American revolutionary who happened to
make beer, Samuel Adams.
Despite my name, I only speak a few words of German, but I have already
discovered the most important word in the German language: Reinheitsgebot,
the German beer purity rule. For over 400 years, German beer could only
contain barley (or wheat), hops and water. Germany was forced to abolish
this law when it joined the EU, but most breweries still follow this custom
and proudly proclaim it on every bottle. Even with so few ingredients, an
amazing variety of beers can be made. Germany's more than 1300 breweries
make at lest ten different styles of beer, with no two quite the same. For
example, wheat usually turns a beer white and cloudy, giving the beer a
tart, even fruity taste, while the longer the grains are baked, the darker a
beer gets, giving it a rich flavor.
Most beers are brewed in either in German, Belgian or English/Irish style.
In fact, more than half of the beers in my Beer Encyclopaedia are from these
three areas. While there is considerable overlap, the Belgians make some
really wild beers that flagrantly violate the German beer purity laws by
including such things as strawberries. It is more than a bit ironic that
Belgium's most famous beer, Stella Artois, is also its worst beer. My
favorite is Leffe, which you can even find on tap at every turn at the
Brussels Airport and at the Third Alley Pub in Itaewon. No visit to Ireland
is complete without a tour (and tasting) at the Guinness Brewery in Dublin,
but Dublin's microbreweries are even better. Guinness Stout is a little too
thick for my tastes and a pint at O'Kim's in the Chosun Hotel will set you
back W15,000. An increasing number of drinking spots in Seoul offer a dark
beer that is actually a mixture of Guinness or Beck's Dark with Korean beer.
Even though my dad swears by this, I find the concoction merely drinkable.
Beer lovers are still mourning the untimely death of the world's foremost
expert, Michael Jackson. I have only tried about 60 of the beers listed in
his guide to the 500 best beers in the world. He describes beers with some
unusual flavors: banana, bubblegum, caramel, chocolate, coffee, mint, nuts,
and smoke, to name a few. These flavors can all be achieved without
violating Germany's beer purity rule
In an increasingly homogenized world where no city is complete without a TGI
Friday's or Outback Steakhouse selling bad beer, beer remains one of the
bastions of local color. Despite the consolidation of the beer industry
into a handful of massive breweries, over the past 20 years there has also
been a proliferation of microbreweries and microbrew pubs. I always try to
visit a brewpub when I travel and I have never been disappointed, whether it
is in the remotest parts of the United States, like Fargo, North Dakota or
some of the remoter parts of the world, like Samarkand, Uzbekistan. Local
beers usually reflect local culture and tastes. Some beers from the U.S.
state of Maine contain blueberries, the fruit the state is famous for.
Burma makes a beer with an algae enjoyed by health food lovers called
spirulina. My two favorite names for beers are Leg Lifter Lager
(Philadelphia), which has a label with a dog lifting its leg next to a fire
hydrant, and Moose Drool Brown Ale (Montana), which has a picture of a moose
drooling. A great web site for finding all of the breweries and brewpubs I
have mentioned is www.beerme.com.
The great beer revolution is only in its incipient phase in Korea. If you
visit your local Seven-Eleven, you can find a beer made by Hite called
"Stout," but it really doesn't live up to the name. It is drinkable, but
not particularly distinctive, and it is rare to find it on tap. You can
also find one of the most famous Belgian white (wheat) beers, Hoegaarden,
but you will pay about W6,000 for a small bottle. Otherwise, market shelves
are a yellow beer wasteland. Most of Korea's microbreweries are clustered
around Kangnam Station, but a few have ventured north of the Han River and a
few more have moved beyond Seoul. Most brew a wonderful combination of
German-style beers that give new meaning to the term saeng maekju
(literally, "live beer"). Patinum near Kangnam Station has the greatest
variety of beers and the best deal if you can eat and drink fast, while de
Bassus in Myeong-dong and Kangnam is the only drinking place I have ever
been where you can receive your beer in a three-liter tower, complete with a
tap to pour for your friends. Believe it or not, one of my favorite Korean
beers is made in Pyongyang, right inside the Koryo Hotel. The dark beer
makes the pain of being locked down in the hotel at night a bit more
bearable.
However, the microbrewery I most frequented due to its close proximity to my
office also has the most interesting story behind it. Octoberfest is tucked
in an alley behind the Kyobo Building and serves an absolutely lovely wheat
beer, a delightful dark beer and even a yellow pilsner that is not to be
missed (all rules are made to be broken!). The founder, Baek Kyung-hak, got
the idea to open the brewery while he was studying in Germany, where he even
learned Germans' fastidiousness for always serving a beer in its proper
glass. However, what motivated him to give up his job as a journalist to
open a brewpub was that while on vacation in the UK, his wife lost her legs
in a car accident. When they discovered how poor the social services are
for the handicapped, he and his wife decided to start a foundation using the
profits from his microbrewery. Thus, one of Korea's first beer
revolutionaries is also a humanitarian.
More beer revolutionaries are needed. Unlike Japan, where I found
microbrewed beers at airports from Hokkaido to Kyushu, none of Korea's
microbrewed beers is available in a bottle. A good first step would be to
introduce "growlers," which are one or two-liter refillable bottles that
customers can have filled and then take home. Also, I must confess that I
am a bit curious what a wheat beer laced with ginsaeng would taste like.
See Beck's Jan. 2007 Article
by Peter M. Beck
Weekly Chosun and Korea Herald
Published 20 October 2007
"Meet an American Imperialist", April 28, 2007
"Expanding Korea's Soft-Power", May 26, 2007
"Leaving Seoul", July 11,2007
"Leaps of Faith", Sept. 2,2007