15 Themes — No. 06 · DRINK
Makgeolli breweries, small-batch distilleries, mountain tea fields and the coffee culture that turned Seoul into one of Asia’s great café cities. Tastings that come with the story of the maker, not just the pour.
The experiences
Andong
Taste Andong soju at its source — the 45-percent original, distilled the old way — with the museum walking you through why this town's water and winters made Korea's most storied spirit.
This is soju before the green bottle: a designated intangible cultural asset, still made by a master distiller's house.
Boseong
Walk the terraced rows of Boseong's Daehan Dawon plantation, Korea's largest tea field, then taste the harvest — green tea brewed properly, green-tea ice cream for the road.
Korean tea culture predates the coffee boom by a millennium; these slopes are where the country's tea ceremony keeps its supply line.
Gangneung
Finish the drinking map with coffee: Gangneung's Anmok beach espresso strip, where Korea's first-generation roasters set up facing the sea and turned a fishing town into the country's coffee capital.
Seoul's café obsession started here — the baristas of Gangneung trained the wave that made Korean coffee culture famous.
Mungyeong · Omynara
Tour the Omynara winery with an expert guide — omija wine and oak-aged spirits in the making — finishing with a tasting; or bottle your own apple brandy, photograph and label it, and take home a one-of-one commemorative bottle.
Korea's five-flavour omija berry meets Western winemaking — a 'Korean wine' that exists nowhere else.
Gangneung · Anmok Beach
Pick a roastery or two along Anmok Beach's coffee street, order a hand drip, and hear how a strip of vending machines grew into Korea's best-known coffee city — the East Sea in front of you the whole time.
Korean drink culture is not only tea and sool: café culture is the daily ritual, and nowhere frames it like a roaster's cup against the sea.
Mungyeong · Omija Theme Tunnel
See Mungyeong's scarlet omija harvest and its syrup in the making, then taste the berry as tea or ade while the story of its five flavours — sweet, sour, bitter, salty, pungent — unfolds.
A drink whose name is its story: vivid red in the glass, five tastes on the tongue, and a clear local origin.
Hadong · Hwagae
Walk the tea fields under Jirisan and the Wild Tea Culture Center at Hwagae, then slow down for darye — or pick and pan-roast leaves yourself before drinking the green tea you made.
The birthplace of Korean tea culture, with the leaves, the wares and the pouring hands all in one scene — an entirely different register from sool.
Jeongeup · Ssanghwa-cha Street
In Jeongeup's old ssanghwa-cha alley, order the herbal tonic tea served almost as a meal — jujube, chestnut, pine nuts and medicinal roots crowding an earthenware bowl, small sweets alongside.
Nothing like coffee or green tea: the loaded bowl reads instantly as traditional Korea, and a whole street is devoted to it.
Seoul · Bukchon
Walk Bukchon or Eunpyeong Hanok Village, taste traditional tea or sool along the way, then distil what you felt into a candle or perfume blended to your own memory of the day.
The trip recorded not in photographs but in scent — a sensory keepsake of your own Seoul.
Send us the dates and the group — we will come back with an itinerary shaped by this theme.
Add this to your client’s itinerary