Hi kids! It’s your friendly neighborhood curate, Reverend Mayhem, subbing in for makeitsnow. He is currently…indisposed.

So, let’s get right down to it. Today, I am reviewing Hitachino Nest White Ale and Red Rice Ale from Japan. I’ve noticed this column trends a little heavily toward North American craft beers, with the occasional jaunt to Europe. This is logical, as that’s where the greatest concentration of really interesting, weird, non-pisswater brews are coming from.

But some of the most innovative developments in alcohol are taking place in the “nontraditional” places. I was fortunate enough to be invited to a Japanese whiskey tasting the other day, and it was almost uniformly delicious. A fair number of scotch enthusiasts write off the Japanese whiskeys as inferior knock-offs. Most are definitively scotch style (they even insist on spelling it “whisky”), but by no means inferior. Some are pretty straight-forward (the Yamazaki 12 year is a pretty straight Macallan clone to my tastebuds) but some distillers have gotten bolder, with odd overtones and non-standard flavor balances becoming more common. If you have the chance, the Yoichi 15 year is especially lovely- exciting but familiar, like your wife coming home one day with a pair of fuzzy handcuffs. Ok, wandering off topic…

Anyway, it got me curious about what Japan is doing with another classically Western beverage: beer. Beer is very popular in Japan, and anyone who has been to a sushi joint knows the major players: Asahi, Sapporo, Kirin and (occasionally) Suntory. Much like our Budweisers and Coorses, the mainline offerings are generally pilsner-style lagers. And again, that makes sense- beer was introduced to Japan by the Dutch, and you will note that most nations who share that beer lineage tend toward pale lagers and variations (like pilsners). But since a taxation change in the mid-1990s, brewers outside the big four have been popping up, and their wares are finally starting to make their way even to the Midwest.

So when I saw not one but TWO examples of relatively non-mainstream Japanese beers at my local boozeatorium, I grabbed them. Then I drank them. Then I wrote about them. Which I guess brings us all up to date.

Both of these beers are made by Kiuchi Brewery, which started in the early 19th Century as a sake producer and only started making beer in that mid-1990s period. Perhaps I’m getting influenced by the narrative, but I feel like the sake-maker background really shows in both of these beers. They are subtle in a way that I’m not sure I’ve encountered in a beer before.

WHITE ALE: The White Ale is…well, it’s odd. It’s recognizably a witbier- cloudy and light straw-yellow. Take a whiff and you get a small/medium dose of hops and a lot of unmalted grain. The wheat persists when you start drinking, both in taste and mouthfeel- other than accidentally swigging the dregs from a bottle-carbonated homebrew, witbiers are the only beers I would describe as “grainy” going down. I even got the disconnect between taste and smell I usually get with witbiers- more hops on the nose than on the tongue. For someone like me who gets annoyed when a brewer goes too heavy on the hops (I feel like it’s often a crutch to cover a lack of depth in flavor) it’s a nice dynamic.

But then you start getting into it and the differences between Hitachino Nest White Ale and more traditional iterations come to the fore. The biggest one is the relative lack of citrus or spices you normally expect. The taste is almost delicate, to the point that I needed to bring it to near room-temperature to really sort out what was going on. There is some orange-peel going on, and the above-mentioned wheat, as well as something vaguely herbal. You get almost no hops (which makes sense with an IBU of 15, around half that of most pilsners and pale lagers) but also very little sweetness. After some later research, I have decided to attribute this to the Japanese beer-culture preference for “dry” beers- i.e. very few residual sugars left after the yeast has finished eating. I feel like I could get another double-size bottle and spend much of another evening continuing to tease apart flavors.

And that’s where I think the sake-brewer background really shows. I’ve had good sake and I’ve had shitty sake, and (to my unsophisticated palate) the better ones tend to be much more subtle in their flavors- hinting and suggesting, rather than bludgeoning, encouraging the drinker to really pay attention to what they have in front of them. Without any of the flavors we normally see at the forefront of beers (sweet maltiness, bitterness, Guatemalan Insanity Pepper, etc.), that’s the experience I had with the White Ale. I had to sit there and really concentrate on what I was smelling and tasting, in a way I only usually do when trying a dram of a good scotch. It was a nice way to drink, although I’m afraid anyone who doesn’t take that kind of time is going to write it off as pretty bland.

DR MRS MAYHEM SAYS: “It’s not much like beer, which is good. It’s not much like anything, really, which is less good.”

VERDICT: One hand clapping, albeit vigorously.

RED RICE ALE: So I went straight from the White Ale to the Red Rice Ale, which may have been a mistake. There is a heavy family resemblance, but going from the Quieter Sister to Louder Sister may have given me a skewed view of how major the differences really are.

Still cloudy. The biggest difference, obviously, is that the Red Rice Ale is noticeably redder in color, because they use red rice as an adjunct instead of flaked wheat. If you’ve never had red rice (and I only had once), it’s something vaguely akin to brown rice on steroids or mild barley- the bran/nutty taste is really the biggest flavor it offers. That same nuttiness comes through in the beer, and struck me as the key flavor note . It’s still low on the hops spectrum, and it’s noticeably sweeter than the White Ale, but still not really sweet.

The problem is that the nut flavors overwhelm any of those subtler notes I was droning on about above. Or maybe I couldn’t get past a slightly assertive flavor after the sensory-deprivation experience of the White Ale. It’s a little betwixt-and-between for my taste- it’s not subtle enough to be a mystery, but it’s too subtle to actually carry off the flavors it’s trying to convey. I’m not saying it’s trying to compete with Samuel Smith Nut Brown, but there is a threshold you cross where you have to commit to your profile or else it just tastes watered-down. The Red Rice Ale just crossed that threshold to my mind but failed to embrace the nutty/toasty/malty character that it makes vague gestures toward.

DR. MRS. MAYHEM SAYS: “Beerier. Tastes a bit like barley soup, if you had screwed up the recipe.”

VERDICT: Too subtle or not subtle enough- either way, stick with the White Ale.