Last month North Korea held its first ever beer festival. Tourists from the West sat on the banks of the Taedong river and gulped back Taedong beer, named after the same river. Our Korea correspondent Steve Evans wasn't invited so he decided to hold a beer festival of his own - in South Korea. But it took some organising.
Sometimes, you've just got to have a beer. The thirst is there. No matter what it takes, you've got to get a bottle. So I flew to Beijing and picked up three.
My thirst was whetted by the pictures from North Korea of people drinking pots of beer in Pyongyang, served just like in the Munich beer festival by waitresses who ferried fistfuls of mugs back and forth from the bar. They did not wear the Bavarian dirndl but they had clearly learned the efficient German way of carrying five or six mugs per trip