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A few months ago, a somehow youthfully hardened face familiar to Westerners started to pop up in advertisements all over Seoul: that of Gordon Ramsay, the British Michelin-starred celebrity chef known for television shows in which he profanely and remorselessly shouts down culinary incompetence in his own restaurants and elsewhere. His sudden prevalence in Korea comes as less of a surprise than the product it promotes: Cass, the flagship beer of Oriental Brewery (OB), one of the few domestic mega-producers who dominated the South Korean beer market for decades and decades effectively without competition \u2014 and thus an unexpected object of favor from such an aggressive enemy of complacency in matters of food and drink.<\/span><\/p>\n
Not that long ago, anybody in Korea who didn\u2019t want to drink Cass could choose only from Hite, Max, or whatever else the conglomerate-owned breweries felt like bringing to market, for all of which even the most nationalistic Korean drinker could only summon one credible defense: that they do the job just fine after a few rounds of powerfully spiced food accompanied by soju, when even good beers won\u2019t have much flavor. This dire situation only began to change about five years ago, when then-Economist<\/em>\u00a0correspondent Daniel Tudor took the heavily regulated local brewing industry to task with an article headlined \u201cFiery Food, Boring Beer.\u201d<\/p>\n
In it Tudor, who has since published the popular book\u00a0Korea: The Impossible Country<\/em>and opened a chain of pizza pubs, wrote that \u201cSouth Korean diners would not tolerate bland\u00a0kimchi<\/em>\u00a0(cabbage pickled in garlic and chili) or\u00a0sannakji<\/em>\u00a0(fresh chopped octopus, still wriggling on the plate), so why do they swill boring beer?\u201d He also dared to venture that \u201cbrewing remains just about the only useful activity at which North Korea beats the South. The North\u2019s Taedonggang Beer, made with equipment imported from Britain, tastes surprisingly good.\u201d In recent years, changes in the relevant laws have liberalized the market for imported and domestic craft beers, creating the conditions for a challenge that Korea\u2019s hulking legacy brewers would sooner or later have to come up with a way to counter.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n