Taedonggang

Type	Lager
Manufacturer	Taedonggang Brewing Company
Country of origin	North Korea
Introduced	2002
Alcohol by volume	5%
Colour	Golden orange
Flavour	"full-bodied lager a little on the sweet side, with a slightly bitter aftertaste"
Ingredients	Water, barley, rice, hops

Taedonggang
Chosŏn'gŭl	대동강맥주
Hancha	大同江麥酒
Revised Romanization	Daedonggang maekju
McCune–Reischauer	Taedonggang maekchu

Taedonggang is a brand of North Korean beer brewed by the state-owned Taedonggang Brewing Company based in Pyongyang. There are four brands of beer marketed as Taedonggang, though the brand known simply as "Taedonggang Beer" is that described below.

In 2000, the North Korean government decided to acquire a brewery. At that point having good relationships with the West, via connections to Germany the Government of North Korea bought the intact and still in place brewery plant of the closed Ushers of Trowbridge, Wiltshire, England for £1.5 million via broker Uwe Oehms. Concerned it could be used for chemical weapons production, after assurances Peter Ward, of brewing company Thomas Hardy Brewing and Packaging bought the plant, and arranged for a team from North Korea to travel to Trowbridge to dismantle it. Reinstalled and operational from 2002, the brewery uses German-made computerized brewing control technology. Since then, North Korea has had a steady supply of beer.

On 3 July 2009, a commercial for the product was broadcast on state-run Korean Central Television in a rare move, as there are very few advertisements on North Korean television. The commercial shows technicians sampling the beer and beer bottles floating in space, shooting out foam reminiscent of a missile launch. North Korea's Taepodong missiles are sometimes called "Taedong" missiles. The commercial has been broadcast three times in all.

Since 2016, the beer has been available in China in limited amounts.

Reviews of the currently produced varieties of Taedonggang beer are somewhat mixed. The most widely available Pilsner style lager is described by The New York Times as a "full-bodied lager a little on the sweet side, with a slightly bitter aftertaste" and "one of the highest quality beers on the [Korean] peninsula for several years". The BBC's Korea correspondent Steven Evans in a September 2016 review notes "an OK beer, a bit bland to my palate more used to magnificent British bitter - a bit too much like ghastly, dishwater, mass-produced American beer, in my opinion."

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Wikipedia