San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Craft beer balances a Korean vibe.
Kimchi and peppercorns add unique flavors to Bay Area craft beer scene
Youngwon Lee has brewed beers with Sichuan peppercorns, gochugaru chiles, omija berries and lemongrass. He’s made sour beer using the bacterial culture from kimchi. Lee’s latest experiment involved brewing with oyster sauce, though he ultimately had to dump it down the drain. “We used too much. It came out way too salty,” he says.
These types of boldly flavored ingredients, often inspired by the Korean food Lee grew up eating, are what characterize his yearold brewery, Dokkaebier. It’s a truly new sort of beer brand for the Bay Area, and for the wider American craft beer industry. In the United States, craft beer is often synonymous with aggressive, hoppy, fullflavor beers, especially IPAs, but the craft beer movement has not gained the same degree of traction in Asian countries like Korea, where lighter beer styles, such as lagers — and other light, subtle alcoholic beverages like soju — are popular. That disconnect may partly explain why, according to the Brewers Association, only 1.9% of U.S. brewery owners identify as Asian.
While it would be easy for beers like these to trade on their novelty status, the appeal of the Dokkaebier lineup lies not only in the sheer originality of brewing with an ingredient like kimchi bacteria. The beers are solidly made, with the flavors building on wellbalanced foundations. They’re a welcome addition to the evergrowing canon of craft beers flavored with culinary ingredients, from mango wheat beers to guava sours to coffee stouts.
Lee spent the early years of his career immersed in wine and spirits, not beer. He was born in Korea, raised in the U.S. and Guam, and he spent a brief stint in Berkeley before moving back to Korea to help take care of an ailing grandmother. In Korea, he got a job with a wine importer, then started his own importing business, bringing big spirits brands like Stoli and Patron into the country. Later he opened a wine shop.
Eventually, he returned to California to work for a Korean craft beer company that had acquired a brewery in Eureka. Drawn to the creativity and experimentation that brewing invited, he decided to set out on his own to create his own beer brand informed by his experiences in Korea and stateside. “Wine is super formal,” Lee says. “But there’s something about beer that’s just really fun. I realized I could make something with an unexpected surprise.”
His first three efforts were full of surprises. There was a wheat beer made with gochugaru chile powder and omija, a berry also known as magnolia berry or fivespice berry. There was a dark milk stout with cardamom and green peppercorn, meant to evoke chai tea. And there was pilsner flavored with bamboo leaves, which has become a permanent fixture for Dokkaebier, and for good reason: Its gentle tea flavor is a beautiful complement to the crisp, refreshing pilsner base.
Dokkaebier’s debut, however, was inauspicious. Lee launched the company in February 2020 with a popup taproom on Polk Street in San Francisco, which involved an ambitious menu by a former Saison chef de cuisine. Barely a month after opening, the pandemic shut it down. They spent the next couple months doing takeout, adapting the menu from the original plan of oyster and caviar flights to more deliveryfriendly fare like fried chicken.
“I’d planned to find a permanent location right away if the popup was successful,” says Lee, who lives in Oakland and is currently using space at other breweries, like Alameda Island and Del Cielo, to make his beer. “But, obviously, I had to take a break from that.”
Lee’s plan B has been more successful than he’d expected, especially when it comes to delivery orders of beer from his website. He spends a couple days a week driving around the Bay Area himself, dropping off sixpacks of cans at people’s homes. Because his roster of beers changes at least once a month, he’s finding lots of repeat customers who want to taste his latest creations.
He hopes at some point soon to turn it into a subscription service, a model that is poised to become more common for craft beer in the years to come. A handful of highprofile breweries, like Lost Abbey and the Bruery in Southern California and the new Private Press Brewing in Santa Cruz, have begun looking to memberships as a way to control the distribution of their soughtafter beers. Meanwhile, during the pandemic, some restaurants have begun offering subscriptions as a way to generate steady business.
Getting his beer into fancy grocery stores like Berkeley Bowl and Gus’s Community Market was easy, but Lee says he’d really like to see Asian, and especially Korean, grocers carrying Dokkaebier cans. That’s been an uphill battle, since many Asian groceries in the Bay Area don’t specialize in craft beer. “It took me six months to get into this one Korean supermarket,” he says.
Even if the ingredients lists make Lee’s beers sound like they would be an acquired taste, they really aren’t. The kimchi sour, for example, does not taste like kimchi in a liquid form. The kimchi culture gives the beer a pleasant tartness, a little reminiscent of kombucha, and additions of chile powder and ginger give it a savory, spicy edge. Anyone who appreciates a wellmade kettle sour would enjoy it.
And some of the Dokkaebier creations don’t depend on culinary ingredients at all. Lee has released several IPAs and double IPAs where the centerpiece ingredient advertised is just a specific variety of hops. He’s trying, in his way, to keep it simple. “I don’t like cocktails with too many ingredients where you can’t recognize the flavors,” Lee says. “Same thing here — I want you to be able to recognize all the ingredients we’re using.”
So far, Lee and his cobrewer Aaron Weshnak have released 18 different beers for Dokkaebier, most of them oneoffs. If they get enough positive feedback from their customers about a certain beer, they’ll consider adding it to the yearround roster, as was the case with the bamboo pilsner. They’re experimenting constantly, sourcing ingredients from both foodsupply companies and just local Bay Area markets, where it’s easy to find items like bay leaf, yuzu, lemongrass and peppercorn.
Lee has been surprised at the reception to some of the beers. “When we released the kimchi sour, I got comments from people who said they expected it to be more weird,” he laughs.
That’s part of why he was excited to brew the oyster sauce beer. Even if the first batch didn’t turn out — and it was the only batch of beer so far that had to be dumped — Lee is undeterred. He’ll reconfigure the recipe and try again. “We’ll make it work,” he says.
It would be easy for beers like these to trade on their novelty status . ... The beers are solidly made, with the flavors building on wellbalanced foundations