Kirin Namakuro
Kirin Brewery Company, Limited

Appearance: Coca-cola brown body with finer carbonation and a creamier, more sturdy head than your garden-variety happoshu. Very attractive for the style. It even leaves a little lacing!

Smell: Metal, light cola-with-lemon sweetness, puffed wheat, standard happoshu adjuncts. I can barely make out the blurry impressions of caramel, coffee, and chocolate that come more into focus as it warms... but so does the unwelcome aroma of cooked corn.

Taste: Weird... it's like they took Asahi Kuronama (very tasty beer) and made a black-and-tan with Enjuku. The caramel, coffee, and chocolate notes are very apparent at first, but they soon fade away to reveal the beer's funky, tangy adjunct base, a marriage of diet cola and cardboard. Finish is dry with an alkaline, starchy twang.

Mouthfeel: This is quite good for the style and the flavor, not fizzy at all but still fairly clean.

Drinkability: This is easier to drink than most happoshu, but even so, I wouldn't like another.

A dark copper color, this beer looks not too bad. The tan head says bye-bye quickly and leaves a disappointing still surface. The smell is faint roasted grains.

The taste is bad. It tastes of malt and dirt mixed; it's dusty and leaves a metallic, unpleasant aftertaste. It's got something of gone-bad wine to it as well. This happoshu is really not any different from the other poor happoshus and is perhaps just one of them with brown food coloring.

Everytime I've drunk this beer, it's made my stomach turn. One is always enough.

They got a new can though, which is awesome. The one before was awesome as well, but now they've changed the white lettering to a gold lettering against a brown, budget-looking can.

ingredients: malts, hops, barley, rice, corn, starch, sugar.
No head or lacing. Off cola color. Smell of old pepsi. Taste of stale coffee, mixed with old pepsi and cut with equal part water. mouthfeel also similar to cola. drank half and poured the rest down the drain.