From Seoul to Busan, beer drinking in South Korea was always a steady pour from the usual suspects.  Hite. Cass. OB Blue (Oriental Brewery).  But starting next week, microbreweries will be allowed by law to sell their beers off-site from brewing locations, and will have their taxes lowered by nearly 15 percent.  However, the road to a more level, and therefore more creative and entrepreneurial beer market, is and was a long road for South Korean business.

Oriental Brewing Co. and Hite-Jinro have dominated the Korean market with bland American-style lagers until Korea changed brewing laws in early 2014.  Before then, German-inspired brew houses and local, small-batch brewing projects popped up here and there.  Then a 2012 Economist article highlighted the the OB and Hite dominance (94.8% of sales in 2013) that favored watery beers in the form of production laws that required capacity to produce one million liters a year, as well as 500% mark-ups for non-listed imported ingredients.  Korea’s low quality beers were not threatened by imports but by a stifling of creativity and competition from within.

The small-brew business that inspired the Economist article, Craftworks, eventually expanded to Gangnam where it opened a location not far from Samsung headquarters.  Coincidentally, or not, two years later a massively popular, 240-seat pub opened in Gangnam called “Devil’s Door”, where waits are up to 45-minutes.  In the “hurry hurry” (빨리빨리) culture where patience runs short, this was even more impressive.  But it turns out the Devil’s Door is a creation of a subsidiary of the Samsung Group.

In 2011, the brewery laws dropped to 150,000 liters a year, a stark contrast to previous restrictions, but not at all in favor of competition that can lead to OB and Hite sales drops.  In spring of 2014, it was cut by a third to 50,000 liters a year, along with a reduction on taxes.  Korea was making fair progress towards a more modern beer market.

But the liters per year drops are just the institutional barriers that have been lowered.  Small breweries and entrepreneurs don’t have the logistics, the start-up companies to partner with, storage, manufacturing, or even a way to lobby which ingredients or brewing equipment can be imported or have a lower tax.  Earlier this year, Oriental Brewing Co. was acquired by Anheuser-Busch InBev NV, the world’s biggest beer maker, for $5.8 billion, a $4 billion increase from what it sold it for in 2009 when it was trying to cut into its debt.  Led by its Cass brand, OB then became the leading producer and doubled its profits.  The $1.3 billion beer market in Korea, which grew by 6 percent in 2013, was part of the big beer machine in Korea that only got part of a bigger, less-inclusive machine.

The small and medium size business and creative economy that is part of the Park Geun-Hye rhetoric is little more than mere legislative gestures, like lowering the liters per year for breweries, but still allows for extensive market shares.  The taxes and lack of supportive, creative measures to help smaller business to create the means to grow and gain double-digit market share in the beer business in Korea had not previously seen sufficient support.  Microbreweries went from facing a fight against two beer giants to a bureaucratic fight.

As Bloomberg reported, Jinro Hite and OB pays around 395 won per 355ml–essentially a can–of beer, which has nearly a 25% higher tax rate than smaller breweries.  This is tax takes on big producers to pay more, which should favor smaller production.  However, smaller breweries ended up paying about 710 won per 355ml, since their tax rate also took into consideration costs of production.

The Korean consumer has shown an interest in new, innovative beers that are as accessible as a Cass or Hite.  That consumer interest can only voice itself loud and clear until the Hite and, now, InBev trucks roll on past the little pubs back to their warehouses.