What Seoul Is Drinking Now: Why Soju Is Losing Ground and Won Soju Is Winning

The way people drink in Seoul is changing. A decade ago, every barbecue-table mise-en-scène was the same: a green bottle, a beer glass, and someone mixing the two with a chopstick — the ritual of somaek. You still see that scene today. But look around: two twenty-somethings at the next table are cracking open canned highballs, and beyond them, someone is sipping a rice-distilled spirit neat, no ice. The shift shows up in the numbers, on the shelves, and between the lines of every bar menu in the city.

Are Koreans really drinking less?

Yes — and the drop is steeper than most people realize. Domestic alcohol shipments in 2025 totaled 2,987,726 kiloliters, a 5.2% decline from the year before. This is the third straight year of contraction, even though pandemic restrictions lifted back in 2023. Blaming COVID no longer holds up.

There isn’t one tidy reason. The pandemic loosened the grip of hoesik — the mandatory after-work drinking dinner — and the instinct to treat health as something you actively manage has trickled down to people in their twenties. A night out that ruins the following morning is increasingly seen as a cost, not a perk. Inflation hasn’t helped either: a single round at a bar in Seoul easily tops ₩30,000 per person these days.

So soju and beer still rule, right?

They do. Beer ranks first by shipment volume, diluted soju second, and that order isn’t flipping anytime soon. But the ground is shifting underneath.

The most visible change is ABV. The green-bottle soju that sat at 25% in the 1990s has been creeping downward for decades, and it just dipped again. Saero, the leading zero-sugar soju, relaunched in January 2026 at 15.7% ABV — down from 16.0% — and switched its base to 100% domestic rice distillate. “Smooth soju” is no longer a trend. It’s the new default.

🍶 The basic lineup you'll meet at any Seoul bar or convenience store

We should talk about somaek, too — that chopstick-stirred mix of soju and beer that was once the grammar of every Korean drinking table. Even manufacturers are now backing away from it. Lotte Chilsung recently ran an ad asking, “Why would you ruin good beer by adding soju?” — a near-official goodbye to the ritual. The era of mixing drinks to spike the alcohol content is fading. People want to taste each drink for what it is.

How did Won Soju shake up the whole game?

When news broke in 2022 that a K-pop star was launching a soju brand, the industry yawned. Celebrity merch, they figured. The result proved otherwise. Won Soju, released by Jay Park through his label Won Spirits, sold out its initial run of 1.72 million bottles in a flash — and scrambled the hierarchy of convenience-store liquor shelves overnight.

What Won Soju disrupted wasn’t so much the flavor as the category itself. Until then, distilled soju lived in the world of holiday gift sets and high-end Korean restaurants: ₩20,000–40,000 a bottle, something your parents’ friends drank. Won Soju dragged that spirit into the convenience-store cooler and wrapped it in a bottle people wanted to post on Instagram.

The distilled soju shelf is a lot more crowded now. Hwayo, made by the celebrated ceramics house Gwangju-yo, leans on its bottle design and an aged lineup that spans 17%, 25%, and 41% ABV. Tokki Soju, crafted by American-born Bran Hill using only glutinous rice, water, and nuruk (fermentation starter), built its reputation in Brooklyn first — then got reverse-imported back to Korea. For anyone raised on green bottles, the moment of recognition — “wait, soju can have aroma?” — usually happens with one of these three.

What are people in their 20s and 30s actually holding?

If distilled soju is the conversation, the actual volume winner is the highball. Whisky and soda — borrowed from Japan’s haibōru culture — landed in Korea around 2022 and now occupies the best real estate in every convenience store fridge.

At convenience stores, highballs have overtaken both whisky and wine in revenue share, and 65% of buyers are in their twenties and thirties. The appeal is almost too obvious: low ABV, not sweet, one can is enough, and nobody has to pay for a whole bottle of whisky to get there.

📊 Convenience store alcohol revenue share (H1 2024)

The interesting part is what happens next. People who got introduced to whisky through highballs are now graduating to the neat stuff. Reports throughout 2026 have noted a clear uptick in single-malt demand, especially among men in their twenties. It’s a polarization: bottles that appreciate go into the collection; everything else gets mixed into a highball. Domestic production is moving too: Lotte Chilsung is building a distillery in Seogwipo, Jeju, with test production targeted for 2026.

Makgeolli has quietly relocated, too. The old image — a rustic bowl paired with a savory pancake, consumed by the older generation — is being replaced by bottles that cost over ₩10,000 from small-batch breweries, poured at Seoul’s growing number of traditional-liquor bars. Unpasteurized saeng makgeolli delivers a slightly different carbonation and acidity with every bottle, and the label design is good enough to photograph. The 2026 Korea Liquor Awards and Makgeolli Expo, both dominated by premium craft labels, are tracking the same current.

And then there’s the option not to drink at all. Korea’s non-alcoholic beer market has grown from ₩8.1 billion in 2014 to ₩70.4 billion in 2024 — nearly a ninefold increase in a decade — and is projected to reach ₩94.6 billion by 2027. The “sober curious” movement — showing up to drinking occasions without getting drunk — has officially arrived in Korea.

Where do you actually find these drinks in Seoul?

For a visitor, the easiest laboratory is the convenience store. Open 24 hours, no time-of-day sales restrictions — and somehow, green-bottle soju, distilled soju, and canned highballs all coexist inside a single fridge. You need to be 19 or older, and they may ask to see your passport.

🥢 Where to go, depending on what you want

📍 Open in Naver Map

Where is Seoul’s drinking culture headed?

The direction feels mostly set. Total volume keeps shrinking. ABVs keep dropping. But the story attached to each bottle keeps getting longer. When drinking was a social obligation, there was no reason to care about the brand. Now that it’s a matter of personal taste, choosing is half the fun.

If you’re planning one night out in Seoul, start with a green bottle — but don’t end there. Not many cities let you trace how the same grain, rice, becomes makgeolli in one glass and distilled soju in the next, all in a single evening.