Beer Review 5: Hitachino Nest Real Ginger Brew

At least this beer provided some good reaction shots

This week’s review is of a beer that was suggested by a reader of my newspaper version. Holy crap, I want to find this person and pick their brain. No idea what they see in this beer…maybe they’re just more in touch with nature than me. This week’s beer is classified as an herbed/spiced beer, which means that boundaries barely exist and flavors can range from poo to amazingness.

With this style, there is a great variety and a plethora of choices of ingredients that can be used. Some of these beers can be seasonal like pumpkin ales or Christmas beers. Other beers under this category are known to have very unique ingredients like hot pepper, hemp, and pine needles – I would best describe these beers as being very different and highly “experimental”. To be fair, the most important thing to remember is to be open-minded and give each brew a fair chance, regardless of the fact that you’re an idiot and you’d want to drink pine needle or hemp beer. Well, I guess you can’t knock it until you’ve tried it… Specifically for this week’s review, I did a ginger beer.

Hitachino Nest Real Ginger Brew is a ginger beer from Japan. With a little red owl and funky font, its label is very attractive and projects itself very loudly. When I first saw this beer, I was sucked in to try it. The beer poured very nice and looked great. The brownish orange opaque color was thick and was perfectly complemented with a chunky looking head. It was very pretty and looked delicious.

Unfortunately, the last time I checked, you can’t smell your eyes. Just from one whiff of this beer, I was grossed out. The earthy aromas in combination with the strong unknown spices created a tingling sensation in my nose. It definitely contained some weird flavors that you can only smell if you go down to Chinatown or an Asian market. I did not care much about finding any ginger smell; I just was hoping that my taste buds would get along nicely with the brew.

As I kind of expected after smelling, I was a bit grossed out. It tasted slightly dirty with a mix of old ginger and apricots. With all the other weird earthy compost tones, I would guess that if I were ever to drink a bird’s nest, this is what it would taste like. Talk about false advertising – if it were up to me, I would change the name by switching ‘Nest’ and ‘Ginger’. However, on a positive note, the mouth feel was creamy and thick, just as it looked. If it didn’t taste so weird, I may have enjoyed drinking it. Ultimately, I ended up chugging it down just for the sake of finishing it – but that was probably the stupidest thing I could have done. Check out Kraig’s and my reactions to get a visual idea of how it felt going down.

Even though this beer was gross and that it may have been one of the worst beers I’ve had, it would be totally unfair of me to say that this was a poorly composed beer. Whoever came up with this must have thought it had a good flavor. This beer was overwhelming, sharp, and extreme. If you have an urge for adventure, I would tell you to try this. But don’t come blaming me if you’re haunted by bird’s nests.

Next week’s review: Storm King.

At least this beer provided some good reaction shots