A soju company, an American brewer and a new brewery.

Cass began as a joint venture between Korea’s biggest distiller and an American brewer. The Adolph Coors Company’s annual reports to the US Securities and Exchange Commission for 1995 and 1996 say that, beginning in 1991, Coors Brewing formed the Jinro-Coors Brewing Company with Jinro Limited, the soju maker, with Coors holding one-third and Jinro two-thirds. In the second quarter of 1994, the filings say, the venture finished a new brewery in South Korea and began producing Cass Fresh; Coors reported that the brand took about a tenth of the South Korean beer market in its first few months, and that the brewery’s capacity was doubled in 1995.

Korean Wikipedia dates the launch to June 1994. The first slogan it records leans on the beer’s freshness, describing Cass as unheated, not pasteurised, beer, and Korean Wikipedia records “Keep it fresh” as a Cass campaign line as late as 2020. The actor Choi Min-sik was among its early advertising faces, Korean Wikipedia says.

The venture did not last. The Jinro group went bankrupt in 1997, Korean Wikipedia says, and its businesses were sold in parts: the soju went to Hite and Cass went to OB, as a Korea Times column put it in December 2017. On 7 December 1999 the news agency Yonhap reported that Jinro-Coors would make a fresh start as Cass Beer Co. under its new owner, Oriental Brewery, and Dong-A Ilbo reported in January 2001 that OB would absorb the company; Korean Wikipedia dates the merger to March 2001.

From the number-two beer to the national lager.

OB itself had a long history by then. The historian Andrei Lankov wrote in The Korea Times in 2008 that Kirin opened a brewery in Yeongdeungpo, now part of Seoul, in December 1933, and that after 1945 it became the company behind the OB brand. The Doosan group sold half of OB to the Belgian brewer Interbrew in 1998, the trade site FoodNavigator reported in 2001, citing Reuters, and Interbrew later raised its stake. That chain of ownership made Cass part of the group that became AB InBev.

Through the 2000s Cass sat behind Hite, the market leader. The turnaround came after another change of owner. Reuters reported that AB InBev sold OB to the private equity firm KKR and its partner Affinity in 2009 to reduce the debt from its takeover of Anheuser-Busch, while keeping the right to buy it back within five years. In January 2014 AB InBev agreed to buy OB back, crediting “strong growth of the Cass brand” for making OB the largest brewer in South Korea, and the company said the deal was completed on 1 April 2014. Cass overtook Hite as the country’s top-selling beer brand in 2011, according to the Chosun Ilbo as cited by English Wikipedia, or in 2012, as Korea JoongAng Daily reported in 2019.

The line has grown around the original lager. English and Korean Wikipedia list Cass Fresh, a lighter Cass Light, the stronger Cass Red, introduced in 2007, a Cass Lemon radler, and an alcohol-free Cass 0.0; Korean Wikipedia’s list of discontinued versions includes Cass 2X and Cass Beats. Newer extensions named there include Cass White and Cass Lemon Squeeze.

Design and documentation.

The seven brands in this group are all beer names from Asia and Europe: San Miguel, Efes, Sapporo, Orion, Cass, Hite and Staropramen. Beer brands in general sit at many different points in the trade, from breweries that still carry the name of a town or a founder to labels that now belong to much larger drinks groups, and a single brand can be sold everywhere from a corner shop to a stadium bar.

A beer brand’s identity is usually carried less by a single bottle than by a label, a name and the place it promises, because the company behind the name may have changed hands, moved its brewing or grown far beyond the place where it started. That makes the questions behind each name worth asking plainly: who started it, who owns it now, and where its beer is actually brewed and packaged.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — its founding story, its owners over time, where its beer is brewed and how its labels have changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A new bottle after 23 years, then a clear one.

For most of its life the Cass bottle barely changed. Korean Wikipedia, citing JoongAng Ilbo, says the 330ml and 500ml bottles were redesigned in 2017 for the first time since the 1994 launch, with the CASS name embossed on the shoulder, a V-shaped curve in the body and a label cut to the same V.

A bigger change followed. Korea JoongAng Daily reported on 12 March 2021 that OB would launch All New Cass, with new packaging, changed raw materials and a new process in which the beer is aged for 72 hours at 0°C; it went on sale in the Seoul area in late March 2021 and nationwide in April. An OB spokesperson told the paper that the company had tried to innovate through both design and raw materials. Korean Wikipedia says a clear bottle replaced the brown one in March 2021, and the trade site Asia Brewers Network describes Cass Fresh as the first domestically produced Korean beer in clear glass, a move rivals later followed. The actor Youn Yuh-jung fronted the 2021 campaign, Korean Wikipedia says.

Celebrity advertising has also drawn attention. OB signed the British chef Gordon Ramsay in 2017; when critics mocked the endorsement on social media, Ramsay defended Cass as the “beer of the people” at a press conference in Seoul, The Drinks Business reported in November 2017, and The Korea Times reported in March 2018 that he had renewed his contract with OB.

Since 2015, Korean Wikipedia says, the brand has staged an annual music event, the Cass Blue Playground. The beer’s home site is cass.co.kr.

For a design guide, Cass shows how a single promise of freshness, carried from a 1994 slogan to a clear bottle in 2021, can hold a mass-market lager together through three owners. Compare Hite, its long-time rival, and Jinro, the soju house behind its first brewery. For this guide we use fresh blue, night blue and ice white with a bold sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Cass’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.