Winners of South Korean discount chain Homeplus’ inaugural beer sommelier competition were granted first-access to its newest beer imports, and consulted over future product additions.
10,000 people took an online preliminary test to qualify to attend the Macmelie Contest – macmelie is a portmanteau of the Korean word maekju, or beer, and sommelier – which took place in December in a convention centre in the Gangnam District of southern Seoul. Around 200 contestants passed the test and competed to become a Homeplus-certified beer sommelier.
To be awarded a Macmelie ID card contestants had to score more than 70 points out of 100 in the retailer’s comprehensive test. This included a written paper, worth 60 points, and a more interactive round including a beer tasting test, worth 40 points.
There were written questions testing contestants’ basic knowledge of beer, for example one asked for the brew’s four core ingredients, or another for the German city that hosts Oktoberfest. Other more difficult questions asked for the number of indents that beer bottle caps have, or for the historic period when Duke Wilhelm IV of Bavaria adopted the German Beer Purity Law.
For the interactive round, contestants were asked to identify beer types by taste and to guess how many millilitres of beer a cup held.
In total, 27 contestants passed the test, with Lee Ik-jin scoring the highest out of all contestants with 84 points. He said: “I didn’t expect to win first place, but I think my experience drinking a lot of beer in the past helped.”
Homeplus currently offers around 690 types of local and foreign beer and hopes to enrich Korea’s beer consumption culture through its Macmelie contest.
“We’ve been offering beer from around the world to meet rising demand that we are now even called the beer mecca,” said Kim Min-soo, a brand marketing manager at Homeplus.
The beer sommelier competition is a really interesting way for Homeplus to engage with an active community and to tap into its knowhow and insight. In this way it is reinforcing its reputation as the go-to destination for beer enthusiasts.
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