From Seoul to Busan, beer drinking in South Korea was always a steady pour from the usual suspects. \u00a0Hite. Cass. OB Blue (Oriental Brewery). \u00a0But 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. \u00a0However, the road to a more level, and therefore more creative and entrepreneurial beer market, is and was a long road for South Korean business.<\/p>\n
Oriental Brewing Co. and Hite-Jinro have dominated the Korean market with bland American-style lagers until Korea changed brewing laws in early 2014. \u00a0Before then, German-inspired brew houses and local, small-batch brewing projects popped up here and there. \u00a0Then a 2012 Economist article<\/a> 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\u00a0one million liters a year, as well as 500% mark-ups for non-listed imported ingredients. \u00a0Korea’s low quality beers were not threatened by imports but by a stifling of creativity and competition from within.<\/p>\n The small-brew business that inspired the Economist article, Craftworks,\u00a0eventually expanded to Gangnam<\/a> where it opened a location not far from Samsung headquarters. \u00a0Coincidentally, 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. \u00a0In the “hurry hurry” (\ube68\ub9ac\ube68\ub9ac) culture where patience runs short, this was even more impressive. \u00a0But it turns out the Devil’s Door is a creation of a subsidiary of the Samsung Group<\/a>.<\/p>\n 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. \u00a0In spring of 2014, it was cut by a third to 50,000 liters a year, along with a reduction on taxes. \u00a0Korea was making fair progress towards a more modern beer market.<\/p>\n But the liters per year drops are just the institutional barriers that have been lowered. \u00a0Small 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. \u00a0Earlier 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. \u00a0Led by its Cass brand, OB then became the leading producer and doubled its profits. \u00a0The $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.<\/p>\n 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. \u00a0The 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. \u00a0Microbreweries went from facing a fight against two beer giants to a bureaucratic fight.<\/p>\n