For Choi Gyu-Won, a 29-year-old Korean in a small village in South Gyeongsang, drinking whisky at home is a way to experience the good life on a budget.
“After tasting highballs at a bar, I decided to make them myself,” Choi said. He makes his own cocktail of soda, ice and whisky with Jack Daniel’s or Suntory Kakubin, which sells for about $35 a bottle in South Korea including taxes. While that’s still cheaper than going out for drinks, it’s far pricier than Korea’s more common soju that sells for about $2 a bottle.
The higher price tag is worth it, according to Choi and many of his peers. South Koreans consumed 14.2 million liters of whisky in 2022, a small amount compared with other nations, but up 46% from 2021, according to Euromonitor International, a London-based researcher. The pace was the fastest in the world, the researcher said.
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