🇰🇷 This Drink Went From 13% to 28% of My Corner Store's Liquor Shelf in Two Years. I Finally Tried It. (2026)

I was standing in front of my corner store's drink cooler the other night, waiting for a friend who was picking up snacks, when I noticed something: the shelf that used to be half beer, half soju mixers, is now mostly slim cans in colors that look more like nail polish than alcohol. Pale green. Soft pink. A kind of milky yellow. None of them said "beer" or "soju" on the front. They all said "하이볼" (highball).

That sent me down a rabbit hole, because it turns out this isn't just my neighborhood fridge rearranging itself. One major chain says highballs went from 13% of its entire wine-whisky-liquor category in 2023 to 28% this year. That's not a new flavor taking a bit of shelf space — that's a whole category eating a quarter of the aisle in two years.

🥃 What a Convenience-Store "Highball" Actually Is

A real highball is simple: whisky, ice, soda water. What's selling by the hundreds of thousands in Korean convenience store fridges is usually something different — a ready-to-drink can built on neutral grain spirit, flavoring, and sometimes a splash of actual whisky or soju, carbonated and canned so you never have to buy a whole bottle just to make one drink.

⚠ Note: this is also where the category gets its one real controversy. Some brands lean on oak chips and coloring to fake a "whisky" taste rather than using actual whisky, which sparked a minor consumer-backlash cycle online. The honest version: check the can for an actual spirit base if that matters to you, because "하이볼" on the label doesn't guarantee whisky inside.

📈 Why This Fridge Looks Different Than It Did Two Years Ago

The numbers behind my corner-store shelf shift are bigger than I expected. One chain reported highball sales up 20% year over year, with people in their 20s and 30s making up 65% of who's actually buying. The category also rode a cultural wave — a highball brand's tie-in with the dance competition show Street Woman Fighter 2 is part of why it pulled in so many younger female buyers early on.

It helps that a can is genuinely cheaper than committing to a bottle. A standard 500ml can runs about 💰 ₩4,500–4,900 (~$3.30–3.60), and chains regularly run 3-cans-for-₩12,000 promotions that bring the per-can price down closer to ₩4,000 (~$2.90) — roughly what you'd pay for an iced coffee, which is part of the pitch.

🍵 The One Everyone Was Actually Taking Photos Of

The specific can that got me curious enough to try one myself was a matcha highball. It's genuinely a strange-looking drink in person — a cloudy, almost glowing green in a clear plastic cup over ice, which is exactly why it ended up all over people's social feeds instead of just their shopping bags. One chain sold roughly 200,000 cans within two weeks of launching it.

The follow-up act is a strawberry version, released at the very end of 2025, deliberately built at a low 3% ABV. That's barely stronger than a light beer, and it's part of a broader "healthy pleasure" pitch — drinks marketed on being easy to finish rather than on getting you anywhere near drunk. It's done well enough that the original matcha version has already been exported in small batches to convenience stores in Hong Kong.

Tasting-wise: it's closer to a bar's seasonal matcha cocktail than anything I expected to find next to the ramyeon aisle. Sweet up front, a real matcha bitterness on the back end, and the alcohol is genuinely easy to miss at that ABV — which is probably the point, and also exactly the kind of drink you don't want to underestimate three cans in.

💡 If You Want to Try the Trend Yourself

• Read the can before you buy. "하이볼" doesn't always mean real whisky — some are closer to a flavored chu-hi than an actual highball.
• Low-ABV ones are easy to underestimate. A 3% can tastes mild enough that three in a row sneaks up on you faster than a single beer would.
• Bring ID even if you're clearly not a teenager. Korean convenience stores check everyone at checkout, foreign tourists included — we've written about just how literally that rule gets enforced.
• Stock rotates fast. If a flavor sells out, it may not be restocked the same week — the same churn that's been emptying shelves across the convenience-store snack aisle lately, as we found out covering why new products disappear so quickly.

🎁 Fun fact: highballs weren't even the first drink to pull this kind of convenience-store takeover. A self-serve frozen smoothie cup did something similar earlier this year, selling 3 million cups in ten months — Korean convenience stores seem to have a habit of turning one new drink format into a national moment every few months.

My corner store's fridge is going to rearrange itself again eventually — it always does. For now, it's matcha-green cans all the way down.

Illustration generated with AI.