History and culture
Korean coffee culture
South Korea has one of the world's highest concentrations of specialty cafés per capita alongside a long-standing instant-coffee/mix-coffee tradition, reflecting two very different, coexisting coffee habits.
Each section below is labelled by how well-established its claims are — look for the label under each heading.
Instant "mix coffee"
Documented history · South Korea
Pre-mixed instant coffee sachets (combining instant coffee, creamer and sugar in fixed proportions, similar in concept to "3-in-1" products covered in CoffeeHQ's instant-coffee guide) have been a long-standing, widely consumed household and workplace staple in South Korea, historically shaped by coffee's introduction and post-war instant-coffee availability.
A dense, design-forward specialty café scene
Documented history · South Korea
Contemporary South Korea, particularly Seoul, is documented as having an unusually high density of specialty and design-focused cafés relative to its population, a more recent (late 20th/early 21st-century) development distinct from, and coexisting alongside, the older mix-coffee tradition rather than replacing it.
Related
How to order this abroad
Preparation traditions
How this history is practised today, in CoffeeHQ's international preparation atlas.
Where it was drunk
The institutions this history runs through, in CoffeeHQ's coffeehouse-history layer.
- The Korean dabang — The Korean coffeehouse of the twentieth century — a tearoom by name that ran on coffee, incubated modernist writers under colonial rule, became a music venue with a resident DJ in the 1970s, and was largely finished off by vending machines and espresso chains.