Hitachino Nest Celebration Ale

From BEER_webalbum

This second picture does some justice to the turbid, muddy red.

This is my first non-generic Japanese cold one, so I'm quite excited. I'm poppin it open as a break from an all-night neuroscience presentation preparation party. I've got a poster to make in one night using data that is incoherently distributed, badly measured, badly analyzed, and best of all results that counter years of publications from my own lab. Sweet. Time to drink some 9% ABV beer.
So, the beer guy at the store said I had to try this. He said it's from one of Japan's best breweries and it's one of the best balanced beers he's had. I trust this guy, so I bought it despite the tag of about $4 for a 330 mL bottle. He also told me that the head is outrageous and there must be something wrong with it, so be careful in the de-capping and the pouring, which of course I wasn't, and now a precious few drops have blessed my coffee table instead of my tongue. I guess we'll call them sips on the concrete, but somehow it seems weird with such expensive sips and no brown paper bag. Anyway, the head is crazy. There must have been some ridiculous pressure changes and maybe some related bottle fermentation on the trip around the world. Thusly, the carbonation is very noticeable to the point that the beer is almost fizzy - you can feel it bubbling on your tongue like one of those powdered vitamin C things or headache medicine... but in a good way. The style is apparently "winter warmer," and I can see the semblance, (http://beeradvocate.com/beer/profile/697/27120), but this is far superior to attempts I've tried from Northeastern breweries thus far. Disappointingly, not much aroma comes off the top, but the taste is sweet and malty with a great hop edge that kicks in on the way down the pipe. I taste apple cider, but in a good way. like if good apple cider was instead beer. and not cider. not apple cider with liquor either. you know...
Anyway, I'm going to quit rambling and go back to embarrassing myself with bullshit statistics (did you know that everything correlates with everything else? it's a fact). If you can get your hands on this cold one, and I've heard people cellar it, which sounds great, I definitely suggest it. Plus it's Japanese and has an owl on it. What more do you need?