Interesting roundup courtesy of What Japan Thinks, of Japanese beer commercials. As opposed to commercials in the UK or US Japanese beer ads are free to focus on the act of drinking the beer itself. The post has a host of then and now beer commercials via YouTube along with some statistics from an Internet survey concerning […]

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According to the Daily Mainichi Kirin Breweries has unveiled a new beer with a lucky seven percent alcohol content. Called “Strong Seven,” the beer will sell for around 141 yen ($1.28) for a 350ml can, and 197 yen ($1.80) for a 500ml can.
Are those prices correct?!

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I grew up around vineyards. My childhood buddy’s family owned one and made their own wine, and at the end of our street was a vineyard owned by DeLoach vineyards. I rode the school bus with one of the kids from the Korbel family. My uncle is a wine broker. He imports fine wines from […]

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There are plenty of Izakaya bars in Korea, but like the Japanese-style ramen joints that sometimes pop up here, it doesn’t hold a candle to the real thing. Most places use the word Izakaya as an excuse to charge extra for food that’s basically Korean. And in terms of the atmosphere and creativity, I’d might have […]

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Another thing I came across on Salon today was an item about Taedonggang, the North Korean beer (spelled Taidonggang on Salon for some reason), which I had an item about a week or two ago.
The piece referenced a post on a good blog based here in Korea called Gusts of Popular Feeling, which asserted that the […]

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For a while this beer was bottled and sold by a guy in Seoul and I drank it every chance I got. Funny enough, I remember the bottles always looking a little scratched up. Turns out they were from China. Go figure.
Unfortunately, as this Yahoo! article details the Taedonggang beer is no longer sold outside North […]

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Lim Kyeong-jin, a sports announcer on MBC has quit after making several on air gaffes while under the influence of alcohol. Lim, who admitted he was drunk before going on air, said he’d had drinks with the program’s staff during lunch to celebrate the Korean handball teams’s recent victory in Japan.

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For me the culture of drinking in Korea is a mixed bag. On the surface I can appreciate the importance of drinking alcohol in an regimented way to bring a group closer together.
Of course this has many downsides as well. People are forced to drink when they don’t want to. People get sick all over […]

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Liquor makers in China are demanding that a city regulation barring public servants and Communist Party officials from excessive lunchtime drinking be revoked. The regulation, launched in January in the city of Xinyang in Henan province, is illegal, according to several of the province’s producers of “baijiu.”
Baijiu is also known as shaojiu, or in Chinese, […]

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Good article translated by Korea Beat analysing the way soju is marketed in Korea versus beer.
I’ve always noticed that Soju is not marketed in the wild, debauched, throwing up-on-the-street kind of way it’s spoken about by Koreans themselves. In fact, it’s the opposite. It’s presented commercially as this sort of white, pure drink…not unlike water. The […]

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