Koreans Love Beer Most
By Kim Hyun-cheol
Staff Reporter
Beer was the most favorite alcoholic beverage in Korea for the past 42 years, with beer consumption growing at the fastest pace, according to the National Tax Service Wednesday.
In 1966, when the NTS began to track the figures, beer shipments stood at 43,598 kiloliters, but the figure snowballed 45.5 fold to 2 million kiloliters last year.
The growth is 10 times as rapid as that of all liquors, shipments of which increased from 736,595 kiloliters to 3.3 million kiloliters during the period.
Two indigenous liquors showed different consumption patterns.
While shipments of soju, a distilled beverage, grew 9.4 times from 102,933 kiloliters to 963,064, that of makgeolli, a homegrown traditional rice wine, fell from 542,801 kiloliters to 172,342.
This means that beer, once a high-end beverage, has become everybody's drink. Beer continues to be the biggest source of liquor tax, the NTS said.
Beer accounted for only 5.9 percent of all liquor consumption in 1966, but the tax revenue from beer amounted to 2.5 billion won, accounting for 38 percent of all tax revenue, for its over-150 percent high tax rate.
Tax on beer fell to 80 percent last year, but the proportion of beer tax revenue rose to 43.5 percent at 1.1 trillion won on the back of surging consumption.
Local beers date back to the Japanese colonial era, when two breweries were built in 1933 to produce beer as war supplies. Both belonged to major Japanese brewers.
The then Chosun Brewery has become Hite Brewery now and Showa Kirin is now Dongyang, manufacturer of the current OB brand. Still, both remain the nation's two biggest breweries.
It was in the 1990s that beer became truly popularized and the beer industry is now going global.
Beer exports topped $22 million in the first half of this year, up 43.2 percent from a year ago, according to the Korea Agro-Fisheries Trade Corporation. Brisk beer exports are attributed mostly to explosive sales growth in emerging markets such as China and Mongolia. Korea's beer exports to the two countries jumped 201 percent and 241.3 percent respectively.
Imported beer almost doubled during the period with 20,556 tons worth $1.9 million imported in the first half of this year, according to the Korea Customs Service. Imported beer is estimated to account for roughly 2 percent of the local market.