Friday and beer. I'm drinking this:
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And it is bloody superb. And I don't mean that in a backhanded 'superb for a crappy Asian ale' way, I mean simply superb--I'd put it against the best beers being produced in the UK today.
A decade ago there were pretty much three beers you could buy in South Korea: Hite, Max and O.B. (Oriental Brewery--the oldest), but they were all 'yellow fizz lagers', cheap, weakish and largely flavourless. Then about six years ago import duties was relaxed and the competition brought a rush of new domestic brews of mediocre to good quality, with an emphasis on wheat beers: an improvement, but a minor one.
Three or four years ago, however, came a revolution. Rules were relaxed about brewing, small business received a series of economic boosts to make them suddenly viable, and there was an eruption of very high-quality microbreweries that have grown and grown. I've mentioned my local 'Playground Brewery' before, but Goose Island have the advantage of huge financial backing and a chain of newly-opened high-end ale bars in Seoul. The result is that I can get five cans of this stuff for, about seven quid at the local convenience store, which sounds expensive until you realise that I once paid eight quid for a pint of Guinness in a local bar. Supermarket alcohol aisles have become three times as long since I've been over here, which can't be bad. There has also been a crash in the exorbitant price of Japanese beers, which I also rate pretty highly--there are some really innovative tastes and styles being developed there. Even some of the U.S. ales are decent--and that's a sentence I would never have imagined myself writing.
Viva the relaxation of tax and regulation!
Cheers!