Issue link: https://read.dmtmag.com/i/961821
60 STiR coffee and tea / Issue 2, 2018 (April / May) I By Josh Doyle n terms of coffee, few countries can tell a rags-to-riches story as well as South Korea. If you visited Seoul in the 1980s, among other surprises you would have found an almost complete lack of coffee culture. Proper cafés were considered elite institutions. Good roasters were hard to come by. Visit today, and you'll find more than 18,000 cafés competing for your attention in Seoul alone. That's more than you can find in New York and Seattle combined. What's behind this rapid growth? Part of it could be a Korean openness to trends; a tendency to grab new ideas and push them to their limit. Korea is a collective society, and when ideas catch on here they can spread like wildfire, which Korea reaffirmed with their recent indulgence for cryptocurrency. But coffee on the peninsula has proven to be more than just a trend. While compe- tition is stiff for cafés, many have managed to fill tables on a daily basis. Award winning baristas have proven that Koreans have a keen sense for specialty coffee, and will be a country to watch in coming years. Now we're seeing new innovations in coffee prod- ucts like roasters and home brewing equipment. Through a history of craftsmanship, a thirst for innovation, and a penchant for good design, Korean brands are carving out an increasingly larger piece of the international market. Many cafés soon close In 2016 Korea imported more than 159,000 tons of coffee products from green and roasted beans to coffee capsules. That volume was up 10% over the previous year. If the Korean market bloomed late, it's surely making up for lost time. But if 18,000 cafés sound like a lot, that's because it is. The bull market of Korean cafés has become sluggish, and newcomers especially are finding the space too satu- rated to profit. Closures for new cafés were estimated at 55% in 2017, and even long- running giants like Café Droptop have been forced to make cuts. On the other hand, suppliers who've managed to price themselves effectively have found enormous success. Coffee sales at 7-Eleven, run in conjunction with Korean conglomerate Lotte, grew 88% in 2015 after they began selling their own drip cof- fee for KRW1,000 won (.94 cents USD). And McDonald's nearly tripled their sales after cutting the price of their coffee from KRW2,100 down to KRW1,500 early last year. Korean consumers have welcomed ready-to-drink (RTD) coffees into their con- How Korea Continues to Surprise the Coffee World Baked goods and a variety of drink products keep seats filled in spacious urban cafés. Centuries of craftsmanship and a hunger for innovation are behind the surge in popularity of Korean coffee roasting and brewing equipment.