Green Tea Beer!!!!

No one could pass this up. Nate and Miyuki stumbled across this in the local Atsumi Food Oasis (great name huh?) in Tahara. Atsumi Foods is known for its great selection of international cuisine, and the freshest seafood that I have ever seen. Sometimes you can see the fish and shrimp still alive in the packages. Now that’s what I call fresh!
Anyways, while perusing the aisles at Atsumi Foods, Nate and Miyuki came across this:
For those that can’t read Japanese (join the club!) the bottle plainly says: Green Tea Draft. Yikes. Are you serious? Green Tea Beer? If you have ever tasted green tea, you may be thinking what we were… “I don’t know about this…”
This isn’t the first time that a Japanese staple has found its way into the brew pot. Rogue (GREAT GREAT BEERS!!!) created classics when they teamed with world-renowned chef, Masaharu Morimoto to create Soba ale. Real Iron Chef Morimoto and Rogue used soba (buckwheat) to make some great tasting ale. Buckwheat, which oddly isn’t related to wheat at all, is very nutritious and gives beer a wonderfully complex nutty taste, when roasted properly. Morimoto also created some other styles with Rogue worth trying, but alas, not found (yet!) in Japan.
This is enough to make one curious enough to try the green tea draft. The other night Nate, Miyuki, and myself cracked this baby open and gave her the old college try. In the glass, the beer looked very cloudy, and had the color that reminded me of a hefeweisen. The beer smelled, strangely enough, like beer and green tea.
Now comes the most important part: taste! We each tasted the brew, then wrote down our reviews, talked about them, tasted some more, paired the beer with food, and came up with the following paragraph that sums up the intricacies of this beer:


It tastes like shit.


I wish I could tell you different. It has a little beer taste, then the bitter green tea taste hits your tongue like a Cry Baby used to. I mean this beer is awful. I don’t know how this swill got past quality control at the brewery. I can’t imagine ever craving this beer, or that I will ever drink one ever again. Add to that the extreme downside that this crap is over $5 a bottle!!! Wow. I am known for my uncanny ability to enjoy any beer, thus creating my motto of, “I have yet to meet the ale for which I didn’t care.” This stuff made me eat crow. Crow, which of course tasted better than the green tea beer. We leave you with this Good Beer Country Boys warning: AVOID IT LIKE THE PLAGUE!!!!!!


P.S. Thanks to The Disgruntled Chemist for his pic of the soba ale! Check out his site for some more great beer reviews!!!