I shouldn’t make too light of this. The guy obviously has a problem. Then again…Jung Su-keun was busted in Haeundae, where I’m known to enjoy a beer now and again, and he was reportedly found with his shirt off. That’s kind of funny.
Police said they did not charge him because of no physical damage inflicted [...]

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Somehow, things at Sajik Stadium got even weirder than a drunk fan running onto the field and threatening a batter with a toy sword. As this article (in Korean) reports, a soju bottle was injured while doing a pre-game  routine prior to last night’s SK vs. Lotte game.

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Here’s the aforementioned feature on Jerry Royster in the LA Times, which features a cameo by me and East Windup Chronicle. Wonder if anyone who took my ticket at LAX will read this on their break and remember me coming through there. If they do they’ll likely see the rant that follows this post and [...]

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I’d meant to link to this a week or so ago when it first came out, but I’ve been busier than it looks. Marmot’s Hole had a very nice photo essay of Gudun Station, one of the few remaining whistle stop train stations in Korea, and perhaps more importantly, close to one of the few remaining [...]

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I have an article in the December issue of Seoul (pdf version here) a travel and culture magazine published here in Korea and edited by Robert Koehler of Marmot’s Hole fame. The piece was for the Weekend Traveler section and is about the Cheongdo Wine Tunnel, which is basically a wine cellar built into an abandoned [...]

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Sapporo beer is the brewer. But don’t look for them to grow potatoes for vodka anytime soon says the spoilsport Russian astronaut.
The beverage, brewed from barley cultivated in the International Space Station in 2006, has splashed down courtesy of the Russian Academy of Science, a Japanese university and beer giant Sapporo.
But the 100 liters of [...]

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I love this idea, both from a marketing and a consumer standpoint. I wish breweries in Korea would do this, but the recipes would be from 1932 (Hite) and 1952 (OB and Cass). Not quite as exciting as beer recipes brought back from 1888.  
From a Japan Marketing News story:

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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. [...]

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