Cockerell and his friends have asked a Beijing micro-brewery called “Great Leap” to come help teach the Tea House workers how to brew a better beer.

It’s the kind of move -- a Beijing hipster brewpub hops over the border to Pyongyang -- that would have seemed impossible a few years ago.

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Pyongyang’s usually quiet streets are filled with revelers on key dates for the regime. For a parade I visited on Victory Day, the July holiday commemorating the armistice between the two Koreas, people came decked in an array of styles, from the military’s oversized pomp, to ill-fitting short-sleeved safari shirts and baggy slacks, to bootleg versions of fancy labels like Lacoste, Dolce & Gabbana, and Dior -- all convincingly faked by the Chinese.

When the tanks have all rolled off, though, the real celebrations begin. In homes and bars across the city, bottles of beer and soju are opened and shared. Driving around the big cities at night, one can sometimes spot clusters of men sinking pints at street bars. “People leave work and go home at five. The men will often come here, after they’ve been home, to drink,” a barmaid at the Taedonggang Number Three beer bar explained via a translator. “Later their wives will call to ask when they’re coming back.”

Most of this is off-limits to foreigners, who must attend pre-approved bars – but there are occasional glimpses permitted. While producing Mass Games documentary A State of Mind in 2003, the physicist father of one of the film’s subjects, gymnast Song Yon Kim, took Koryo Tours’ Nick Bonner and crew out for a beer.

It was, Bonner says, “one of the coolest bars in the world. There was a seat left empty where Kim Il Sung once sat. Otherwise, drinking was the same as in any country. Social drinking, chatting, and joke telling… we renamed the pub the Red Lion and became celebrities with the locals -- nothing more than wishing us well in Korean and occasionally English -- but we were, for a few months, definitely part of the ‘in’ crowd.”

According to Petrov, Korea’s beer culture was introduced by the Japanese during the colonial era, from 1910 to 1945, and enthusiastically embraced.

The Taedonggang, named after Pyongyang’s river, is one of the city’s most notable nightlife stops, producing seven types of beer. Although these are named with typical Soviet flair -- Beer Number 1, Beer Number 2, Beer Number 3 and so forth -- the equipment used in their brewing actually comes from a well-regarded, though now defunct, British brewery. “When I was visiting North Korea, I was pleasantly surprised at the quality of their Taedonggang beer, of which we drank quite a lot,” recalls Alistair Humphrey – or “Humph” – whose father was chief brewer for the British ale makers Usher’s of Trowbridge, before he died and the brewery was sold. “When we got back to Beijing, I went out with Nick [Bonner] and Simon [Cockerell] of Koryo to the Great Leap Brewery, and the subject of Usher’s came up. They asked if I knew what happened to the brewery, exchanging conspiratorial looks. ‘It folded. I think it’s now a supermarket,’ I said. ‘No!’ said Nick, gleefully. ‘It was sold to the North Koreans – they’ve been using it to brew the beer you were drinking last week!’ So the equipment my father bought to brew English ales lives on in Pyongyang.”