Why do Koreans drink soju?

The bottle is designed to be shared

Three features of soju make solitary drinking awkward and shared drinking easy. It is inexpensive, so no one is doing anyone a favour. It is low in strength at 16–17%, so it lasts a whole meal instead of a single round. And by convention you cannot pour your own, so every glass you drink requires somebody else to have noticed that it was empty. That last one is not a quirk of manners; it is the whole mechanism.

Everyone is equal in front of soju

Korean social life runs on precise gradations of age and rank, and the drinking table is the one place where they are deliberately suspended. The same bottle, the same small glass, the same price for everyone at it. Hierarchy still governs the gestures — who pours, who lifts first, who turns away — but not the drink itself. This is why so much Korean business, friendship and reconciliation happens at a table with a green bottle on it: it is the available format for talking to someone as a person rather than as a rank.

Whisky talks about whisky. Soju talks about you.

It is a fair description of the difference. There is no soju connoisseurship to speak of, no tasting vocabulary, no vintage. Remove the drink as a subject of conversation and what is left to discuss is the people at the table. Korean drinking culture is, in that sense, a conversational technology.

What has changed

Anyone writing about Korean drinking from a description more than a decade old will get it wrong. Four things moved:

• Coercion became unacceptable. Pressing someone to drink (강권) went from normal to prohibited, in workplaces explicitly. See drinking etiquette.
• Drinking alone became ordinary. 혼술 (honsul) carried a stigma until the mid-2010s and now does not.
• Strength kept falling. The mainstream bottle went from 25% to 16–17% within one working lifetime, and somaek and low-ABV mixes took share from straight soju.
• Non-drinkers were included. A Korean table in 2026 routinely holds people drinking nothing, and the etiquette absorbed this without breaking.

What the association's position is

That the interesting thing about Korean drinking culture is the consideration, not the alcohol. We document it as heritage — gestures, sequence, games, language — and we do not promote any brand, any volume of consumption, or drinking at all. Everything on this site can be practised with an empty glass, and the part worth exporting is the attention people pay to each other, which does not require a drink.