I Regressed and Became Too Good at Brewing - Chapter 46

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This chapter was translated by Lunox Novels. To support us and help keep this series going, visit our website: LunoxScans.com
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Episode 46. Hops and Hope (2)
“Honey, maybe we should just… look into filing for Personal Rehabilitation. I called a few law offices, and they said our situation might make it worth going through the process.”
Jin-woo, a brewer in his mid-thirties and a husband to a family, set down the cloth he’d been using to wipe the valve on the fermentation tank, his hand falling limp.
His hands, always rough and callused from handling brewing equipment, now trembled only with despair.
At the foot of Dobong Mountain.
A small craft brewery called The Hop, tucked away in a quiet alley.
This modest distillery, born from the blood, sweat, and tears of a young couple pooling their deposit savings and loans, had become a monstrous trap slowly strangling the breath from their lungs.
“…Let’s hold on just a little longer. If we can make it through this month’s rent, summer’s peak season—maybe we’ll get more customers.”
Eun-chae, his wife, spoke with deliberately bright cheer, but the deep hollows under her eyes and her haggard complexion couldn’t hide the truth.
Reality was merciless.
Trends shifted daily, and with large craft beer corporations dominating convenience store shelves, survival for a small brewery tucked in an alley seemed nearly impossible.
The rent that came due each month, the cost of raw materials, the loan interest—all of it nibbled away at the couple’s soul bit by bit.
Jin-woo sighed and poured a freshly drawn IPA Beer into a glass, handing it to Eun-chae.
He poured himself a glass as well.
It was a choice born of necessity—without an afternoon drink to numb the despair, he didn’t think he could survive.
…….
…….
Heavy silence settled between them, and then, in unison, their expressions twisted into something bitter.
They’d made it themselves, yet neither could call it delicious—that bitterness.
It wasn’t for lack of effort.
No, if you looked only at effort, it would be harder to find people who worked as hard as this couple.
Sanitation, essential for anyone in food and drink, was always their baseline.
Tracking minute-by-minute changes during the Mashing process had become routine.
Splitting sleep into one-hour chunks for nighttime monitoring had become second nature.
All of it—for the taste of the beer alone.
It was clean, it was crafted with care, but that was all there was to it.
The truth was, it had no flavor.
“Maybe… maybe we’d have been better off doing something other than beer…….”
“Honey…….”
“I mean, our beer wasn’t that good even before this, was it…….”
The situation had become so dire because of a Yeast supply problem.
But there had been problems even before that.
They lacked that one decisive punch—something to make customers open their wallets, something to draw people from far away.
The hop aroma was muddled, the flavor ordinary.
No matter how many nights they stayed up adjusting recipes and controlling temperatures, they couldn’t break through to a taste that set them apart from factory beer.
They were doing their best, so why couldn’t they see a path forward?
Was their effort aimed in the wrong direction?
“And… even after a month, he hasn’t reached out…….”
“No. Let’s wait a little longer. He might be in the middle of research. He may have never made beer before…….”
The person Eun-chae was placing her hope in was none other than Song Yeon-woo, the young owner of Songhadan, who’d been riding a wave of popularity lately.
A craftsman who, in his twenties, had created successful traditional liquor and even achieved the unprecedented feat of becoming a Four-time Champion at the Korean Liquor Awards.
And hadn’t this very man approached them first, offering to help?
But Jin-woo shook his head at Eun-chae’s words.
“That was just our wishful thinking. We really had no business asking him for help in the first place.”
It had been improper from the start to ask a craftsman of traditional liquor to help with Brewing beer.
Of course, the urgency of their situation might have excused it somewhat, but it wasn’t the right thing to do.
What Jin-woo and Eun-chae faced, they should face together.
If they couldn’t overcome it, they had to accept that failure together as well.
‘If it were just me, I’d manage somehow. But Eun-chae…….’
When he’d quit his steady job at a mid-sized company to persuade her to start this brewery, his wife Eun-chae had been the only one who believed in him and stood by him completely.
He couldn’t burden that person with the weight of his own failure.
But what could he possibly do about it?
Just as a vast, vertiginous terror was crashing down on him, as if he stood at the edge of a cliff—
Knock, knock, knock.
A sound at the door, though it wasn’t yet business hours.
A pleasant, measured knock rapped against the brewery’s glass door.
But both of them had to shrink back.
The faces of loan sharks and debt collectors who’d been appearing out of nowhere lately, rapping roughly on the door, flickered through their minds.
“Go to the back.”
“Um…….”
Jin-woo quietly positioned Eun-chae behind him and swallowed hard, then walked toward the door.
There’s nothing left to lose anyway.
If they meant to threaten him…….
Sweat beaded on his clenched fists.
“Who is it? We haven’t opened yet…….”
He trailed off as he opened the door, and his eyes went wide.
The man standing outside wasn’t some thug built like a radish.
Nor was he a loan shark with a menacing face.
A man who could only be described as neat and composed stood there instead.
The young man who was smiling carried an air that was somehow both intellectual and serene.
“Hello. Is this The Hop?”
The young man bowed politely and greeted him.
His voice had an almost uncanny quality—the kind that calmed the listener’s mind.
Like the voice of someone who had weathered many storms in life yet persevered steadily onward.
Though his age suggested otherwise.
And Jin-woo already knew who this man was.
“S-Song Yeon-woo… President!”
“I hope I’m not terribly late. My apologies.”
“Not at all! Really, not at all! Thank you!”
Yeon-woo hadn’t even completely solved their problem yet.
Nor had he offered the breakthrough itself.
And yet Jin-woo felt tears suddenly spring to his eyes at the wave of relief that swept over him.
Behind him, Eun-chae was already wiping away her own tears.
“Allow me to introduce myself properly. I’m Song Yeon-woo, president of Songhadan. I’ve come to make beer with both of you.”
* * *
A month had passed since they’d met at the Korean Liquor Awards hall.
The complexion of both Jin-woo and Eun-chae had grown even darker than before.
Dark circles descended to the edge of their jaws, and their eyes sat hollow in their sockets.
To any observer, they bore the look of those who had endured grave hardship—a sympathy I could feel acutely.
In my past life, I’d lived through something like this myself.
By now, no matter how often they swept them away, fresh summons and demand notices would be stuck to the front door lock each morning.
They must have sighed each day watching the balance climb higher.
Starting with credit cards, then bank loans, borrowing from acquaintances—and still finding no real solution, only deeper debt.
To restore this couple’s life, there was only one thing that needed to be solved.
“Would it be possible to review the beer again? I’d like to see if anything has changed since last time.”
“Oh! Yes, yes! Of course! I’ll bring it right away! Please, have a seat and wait!”
Jin-woo sprang to his feet and hurried toward the tap with an awkward gait, yet the moment he began pouring, he revealed the bearing of a craftsman.
He was a man who truly loved his craft.
If there were any guarantee that burning his own lifespan would improve the taste of his beer, I suspected he would do exactly that.
Standing before me in Jin-woo’s stead was Eun-chae.
“I found the brewery name—The Hop—quite striking.”
“Ah, yes. He really loves the distinctive bitter flavor that hops bring. That’s why we named it that way.”
“I think that’s good. Having character is a virtue.”
If people drank merely to intoxicate themselves, there would be no need for different styles or breweries at all.
It’s because people wish to savor distinct characteristics and flavors that brewers emerge and study their craft.
In that respect, this couple’s philosophy and approach to beer could be called sound.
“The IPA.”
The IPA that Jin-woo handed me appeared visually flawless.
The distinctive luminous, deep amber hue of a West Coast IPA glowed in the transparent specialty glass, crowned by a creamy, dense white head that formed a soft cap.
But my eyes saw the truth.
“It’s just as it was before.”
A proper IPA should assault the nose the moment you lift the glass—exploding with citrus and tropical fruit, along with the distinctive bitter aroma of hops—yet here those scents were oddly suppressed.
Given that the brewery itself was named after hops, they must have added it lavishly, making this deviation decidedly strange.
Instead, filling that void was the flat, stale sweetness of barley malt that had cooled, and something else—a faint, unpleasant DMS note that pricked the nose like rotting radish.
“Have you attempted any other approaches?”
“Well… you mentioned yeast, so we kept changing suppliers, but…….”
“We even disassembled everything and scrubbed inside the nozzles completely, yet nothing changed.”
The single sip I took hesitantly proved far more damning still.
What touched my palate first wasn’t the substantial body of beer, but a sticky, unpleasant flatness—residual fermentable sugars left behind from incomplete fermentation.
The yeast had failed to cleanly consume the sugars and metabolize them into alcohol and carbon dioxide, leaving the beer’s entire structure utterly collapsed.
Before the beer had even slid down his throat, the refined bitterness of hops gave way to a sharp, acrid harshness—gritty and rough against the back of his tongue.
What should have been a clean finish instead lingered with a sour, stale aftertaste that clung stubbornly, leaving the palate parched and unpleasant.
“This is… a sick beer.”
That description would be exact.
A sick beer.
The Hop’s IPA was in critical condition.
Even visually, one could sense it.
The aroma showed every sign of possessing qualities enough to become a fine IPA, yet everything was ailing, languishing.
“Would you mind if I took a look inside?”
“Of course. This way.”
He left the beer unfinished and stepped into the Brewing area.
The first thing that struck him was an almost obsessive fastidiousness.
Most breweries in financial straits grow lax in their upkeep—beer sediment crusts the floor, scale builds on the equipment.
But this place was different.
“How many times a day do you clean?”
“Honestly, we don’t have customers anymore, so… I just keep cleaning whenever my heart aches. I’ve lost count.”
The stainless steel fermentation tanks and mashing vessels gleamed without a speck of dust, and the tiled floor was spotless, as though it had just been cleaned and dried.
The beer lines were organized with meticulous care.
Some equipment stood idle for lack of funds,
yet the owner’s affection and craftsman’s spirit permeated every corner of the space.
‘This is a good place. These are people with an honest approach to their craft.’
Even as they contemplated Personal Rehabilitation for want of capital, this couple had never surrendered their pride as brewers or their commitment to cleanliness.
It was just as he was about to launch a proper investigation into the problem.
<Oh… oh, my belly… I’m dying, I’m dying…….>
From somewhere came a faint, metallic groan—the sound of something ailing.
He glanced at Jin-woo and Eun-chae, and they stood there anxiously, waiting for his lips to move, as if they heard nothing at all.
Which meant what he was hearing now….
<Oh! Someone save this Dokkaebi…… Please, somebody help me…….>
It was a plea for help from the Dokkaebi in this place.

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This chapter was translated by Lunox Novels. To support us and help keep this series going, visit our website: LunoxScans.com
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