Saturday, January 25, 2025

September 12, 2016

Attention Craft Beer Fanatics – Please Enjoy This Video Footage From North Korea’s First Beer Festival

If you're hopping on a plane and heading to a beer festival it's probably Oktoberfest, and I don't think North Korea's efforts are going to change that.

Spoiler alert – everyone loved the local ale from the government’s Taedonggang brewery.

North Korea has just finished hosting its first ever beer festival, and you better believe that the state came out looking pretty rosy.

The revered local ale, with a five percent alcohol content, is said to be ‘sweet with a bitter aftertaste’, which left the people in this video below rather chuffed.

Some more on the festival from NewsAU:

There are seven beers on tap, served by chipper waitresses in blue and white uniforms: Beer 1, Beer 2, Beer 3, Beer 4, Beer 5, Beer 6, and — you guessed it — Beer 7.

While the names might leave something to be desired, they’re being served with copious amounts of crowd-pleasing chicken, pretzels and edamame beans under the lights of the Taedong River Pier in central Pyongyang.

More than 800 people reportedly attended the nationalistic opening ceremony, in which the director of North Korea’s General Bureau of Public Service told guests the event symbolised “the superiority and vitality” of the socialist leadership, which is “all about the people”.

But wait, it gets better. This is a direct quote from a newsreader on the state-run TV station KCTV:

“The Pyongyang Taedonggang beer festival shows our people’s lives filled with happiness and optimism, building up a people’s paradise and a highly civilised socialist country, while smashing the US and its followers’ heinous moves to isolate and stifle the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.”

Just another reason why beer and talking politics doesn’t mix.

[source:newsau]