HItachino Nest Beer 3 Days

Today I'm going to look at what appears to be the only Japanese brewery that we get in the States that still makes their beer in Japan. I'm talking about none other than Hitachino Nest Beer! (I am now going to refer to them as "Hitachino Nest" only.) Brewing out of Tokyo, I first heard of these guys when I saw a beertuber and friend of mine post a video of his personal tour at the brewery. The video was in Japanese, as expected, and Winton (BeerichiTuba on youtube) wrote all the subtitles himself; it looked like a really nice brewery, and I hope to visit it someday. Anyway, on to the beer.

3 Days has an interesting story behind its birth. If you can read the label in the picture you can get the full story, otherwise you'll have to live with my short summary. So, March, 2011 an earthquake hit Japan, as we know, and the brewery also went down for a while. Due to a power outage the mash tun, with wort in it, sat for three days and developed natural fermentation with in-brewery cultured lactic acid. They say that this beer was limited to 8,000 bottles only. That may sound like a lot, but a case of bombers and non-six-pack beers is 12 bottles, so that is around 666 cases. Moving on...

3 Days pours kind of caramel-like orange brown with a light beige head resting atop the fluid. For those of you who are big on visualization, it looks pretty good but amazing. The aroma is somewhat surprising. The closest style I can come to for this is a "Belgian Strong Ale" (courtesy of www.ratebeer.com) and that is basically a catch-all for higher gravity Belgian beers that are not sours, saisons, or "abbey" styles (dubbel, tripel, quadrupel) and are often hard to distinguish from the abbey styles. The 3 Day smells like salted caramel coupled with some sort of barnyard funkiness. I am not sure how I feel about that; I can't really say I like it a lot, but it is not bad.

The taste is more in line with what I would expect, but there is still a twist. We have big caramel and bready flavors, typical of the Belgian styles barring sours, and the twist comes in with a hint of sour fruit. This sour character must come from the lactic acid and the fruit aspect is also typical of Belgian styles.

3 Days has a thicker body, as expected for the style, and is very smooth but is lacking in that typical Belgian carbonation and finishes with some funk on the back end.

From what I've gathered, this brewery is certainly worth trying if you can find their stuff. Check Florida and Wisconsin and California, I don't know where else. If you can find this beer, pick it up. It is rare.

Kiuchi Brewery
Hitachino Nest Beer 3 Days
TCSH - 7/10
Aka - limited, rare, average

Dallas