Why A South Korean Brewery Moved To California To Make Korean Beer

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.