Booth Brewing, one of South Korea's most visible craft beer producers, doesn't make its beer where Korean beer giants Hite and OB produce their ubiquitous watery lagers. Instead, most of Booth's beers are brewed in Eureka, the California city near the Oregon border most known for redwood trees and marijuana cultivation.
Booth launched in Seoul in 2013 after husband and wife team Sunghoo Yang, a former investment analyst, and Heeyoon Kim, a former doctor, wanted to help correct the dearth of craft beer in South Korea. Part of their impetus was an article that ran a few years prior in The Economist. "Brewing remains just about the only useful activity at which North Korea beats the South," the article concluded, while declaring North Korea's government-brewed Taedonggang as more memorable than South Korea's beer offerings.
Like many South Koreans, Yang and Kim wanted to prove that conclusion wrong. So they teamed up with Daniel Tudor, the article's author, and opened a pub that served pizza and craft beer out of a Seoul alley. Their patriotic origin story and quirky branding — their bottles have colorful labels featuring the adventures of a blue creature called the Boothman — quickly attracted a fan base. Within the year, they expanded to four more locations.
"Hoppy beers, it's an acquired taste," says Yang. "The first time you try it, it's a little different and bitter, but then once you get the hang of it, you really appreciate the style and then people kind of get addicted to it." For many of their customers, trying American-style hoppy IPAs for the first time was a hard sell. "I think half the customers, when they first came to our bar, thought our beer was too bitter, so they couldn't finish a pint. But then as time passed on, that wasn't a problem anymore," Yang says.
It was a good time to join the craft beer business. In the early 2000s, the Korean government started issuing microbrewery licenses, leading to a boom in brewpubs, usually offering German-style beers like wheat beers and Pilsners. But they were only allowed to sell their beer on the brewery premises. In 2014, the laws changed, allowing smaller breweries to finally distribute outside of their pubs.
A few years ago, Booth was having its beers made off-site by a contract brewery. But the company wanted to grow, and to do that, it needed its own brewery. At the same time, Eureka's Lost Coast brewing, an American craft beer mainstay since 1989, was also growing. Yang and Kim were familiar with Lost Coast, and when that brewery announced its move to a bigger facility, the Booth founders heard the news. So they traveled across the world to buy Lost Coast's 30-barrel brew house, and started producing beer there in 2017.