Hitachino Nest Ancient Nipponia 330ml x 24

When Toshiyuki and Youichi Kiuchi launched craft brewing in 1996, they inherited a sake house founded in 1823 — and a conviction that Japanese terroir deserved its own beer grain. Nipponia is brewed from 100% Kaneko Golden barley, a heritage variety that had disappeared from Japanese agriculture since the 1960s; Kiuchi contracted Ibaraki Prefecture farmers to bring it back exclusively for this beer, drawing on a region that once supplied roughly 27% of Japan's domestic barley crop. The grain is grown in the flat, alluvial farmland surrounding Naka City, where the brewery's medium-soft well water at Nukada Brewery (額田醸造所) shapes a clean, low-mineral fermentation base. Fermentation proceeds in stainless steel at approximately 20°C, with malt milled on-site and saccharification resting for approximately 40 minutes — a tight, controlled mash designed to let the single heritage grain speak without adjunct interference. What makes Nipponia categorically unusual is its premise: no other Japanese craft brewery has revived an extinct domestic barley variety and built an entire beer around it as a single-origin grain statement — the same Kaneko Golden also feeds Kiuchi's whisky distillation program. The result is a pale ale of uncommon grain depth, where the character of a recovered agricultural lineage drives the profile rather than hop variety or yeast exotica.