News / Drink
Bristol’s unusual link to North Korea
With the news that North Korea has held its very first beer festival, Bristol can claim an unusual link to the Taedong beers that were brewed for the festival described on state television as “showing our people’s lives filled with happiness and optimism… It’s a people’s paradise and a highly civilised socialist country, while smashing the US and its heinous followers.”
Look around at pubs across Bristol and on a few you will see red and white signs for Ushers, a former brewery that was dismantled brick by brick in 2000 and rebuilt on a cabbage patch in Pyongyang.
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More than 2,000 tonnes of equipment and kegs was carried from Trowbridge in Wiltshire to Avonmouth, with 30 containers carrying the remains of the brewery made ready for a month-long sea voyage to Wonsan, two hours east of Pyongyang.
According to this article in the Indepedent, the deal was almost scuppered by wary customs staff at Avonmouth – but the ship was eventually allowed to depart.
The Miner’s Arms in St Werburgh’s is another Bristol pub still to carry an Ushers sign:
St Werburgh’s Church just up the road from the pub has a similar story to the Ushers brewery, as it was also dismantled brick by brick from its original home in Corn Street and rebuilt in 1878, later giving the area of Baptist Mills its new name.
Read more: A visit to Bristol’s first prosecco bar