Daioh Farms: Wasabi Beer (Japan: Vegetable Beer: ? abv)
Visual: Dark lime green and very bitty. Frothy light green head that fills a good fifth of the glass and has darker green lines laced over it.
Nose: Ice cream. Lime jelly.
Body: Thick texture. Lettuce. Creamy. Brown sugar. Ice cream.
Finish: Dry spice rack. Slight warmth at back. Lettuce. Brown sugar. Light apricot?
Conclusion: I really don’t know what this beer is (See background for more details). It isn’t very wasabi influenced at all, except maybe the color. Then again even the color calls to mind dye rather than actual wasabi.
Quiet creamy textured in a way that reminds me of hub ale, and quite sweet. You only get a hint of wasabi in the lettuce like touches and a slight spice rack element in the finish. There isn’t any notable fire anywhere. If you hadn’t told me it was a wasabi beer I would not have guessed. I’d probably had thought someone had ditched spinach or lettuce in it.
So a beer that has by closest comparison a similarity to hub ale. That is a very bad sign. It is actually better than hub ale, a bit more flavor and sweeter, but that isn’t saying much at all and overall the beer feels very generic.
As my regular readers know I am a sucker for an oddity, so when I say the beer doesn’t even deliver that know that it really doesn’t. Heck, as I say, if you hadn’t told me I wouldn’t have guessed the extra ingredient. Oddly if I had to list a high point I would say there is occasionally a light apricot touch in the finish. I have no idea where it came from, it doesn’t seem to match with anything else the beer delivers.
If you are at the farm, then you will probably, like me, be tempted to try the beer just to say you did. That pretty much is the only reason to try it. Adequate at best, any more honest description would have to call it far below sub par.
Background: Found at Daioh Wasabi Farms in Japan, this beer is a bit of a mystery. It is a beer made with wasabi, and from the fact it is served on a wasabi farm along with an insane amount of other wasabi products I presume it is local wasabi. However I’m not quite sure who exactly made the beer, there is no brewery, nor any abv listed. When I asked the person serving me said it was a Kirin beer, but considering he first said Asahi then glanced at the tap handle I am not entirely trusting his opinion. Best guess, it isn’t actually a beer brewed with wasabi, they have just taken another beer, maybe a Kirin beer, then dumped wasabi into it and served it. The large amount of sediment in the beer supports this vague guess that I’m passing off as a hypothesis. If anyone else knows differently please let me know.
In case you don’t know wasabi is a horseradish like vegetable that is used to add spice to food quite regularly in Japan. While I did not have hopes for the beer, my love of both wasabi and an oddity meant I thought it worth giving it a shot and a review.