From a King's Cup to a 1976 Sachet: How Korean Coffee Keeps Reinventing Itself

A Royal First Sip

Korea's love affair with coffee did not begin in a hip Seoul café or behind a gleaming espresso machine. It began in a royal court. In the final years of the 19th century, King Gojong was introduced to the drink — a detail that says everything about how slowly, then suddenly, coffee would come to define a peninsula.

For decades that first encounter stayed closeted in privilege. When coffee finally found its public stage, it arrived in something called a dabang.

The Tearoom That Wasn't

The word literally means tearoom — da for tea, bang for room. But dabangs quickly became something richer: places where tea, coffee, and other non-alcoholic beverages were served to a growing urban population that needed somewhere to sit and be seen. The very first opened around 1923 inside the Sontag Hotel, during the Japanese colonial period, established by Antoinette Sontag — with the support of King Gojong himself. A European hotelkeeper, a Korean king, a borrowed concept: from the beginning, Korean coffee culture was a hybrid built on improbable alliances.

The Sachet That Conquered the Peninsula

For much of the 20th century, coffee in Korea meant one thing: instant. In 1976, Dongsuh Foods — makers of the Maxim brand, operating under a Maxwell House license — introduced Korea's first 3-in-1 instant coffee mix: powdered coffee, sugar, and powdered cream, all in a single-serve packet. It was engineered for convenience and it dominated. The ritual of brewing gave way to the tear and pour.

Yet that dominance created its own pressure. The more thoroughly instant coffee claimed the mainstream, the more room it left for something slower, more deliberate, more obsessive. The specialty movement that followed was not a rejection of Korean coffee history. It was its inevitable next chapter — and the founding story of every hand-drip bar that came after.