I should have gotten a photo of the top of this can of IPA from Japan’s Yo-Ho Brewing Company.

At the very least it’d be more interesting than the cheap one here where I’ve just held the can in front of the camera (y’know, sometimes trying to come up with remotely interesting photos for this blog is just too hard).
Why should I have opted for a pic of the top of the can? Because it features what I understand to be Japanese Braille. I assume that it means “IPA” but given that I don’t read either Japanese or Braille (or even Japanese Braille) I can’t be completely sure).

You can check out this blog for two suggestions as to what it says. And you can also check out the Braille while you’re there because he was smarter than me and took a photo of it.

I wasn’t sure what to expect from a Japanese brewery making an American IPA. Some Japanese beers I’ve had tend to lose a bit in the translation – or maybe they just take on some of Japan’s beer scene’s characteristics, which would taste unusual to me.

It started things off with some piney notes upfront (and perhaps a hint of stonefruit), which made me think they’d worked out the US IPA style. There was also that pineyness on the tongue, but not as much as you might get with some US styles – it didn’t feel like I was drinking a Christmas tree.

I did get a lot of bitterness however. How much bitterness? Well I was eating salt and vinegar chips at the time (yeah, eating and reviewing beer, what you gonna do about it?) and the bitterness still cut through. In fact it made me wonder just how bitter it would have seemed if I’d been going salt and vinegar chip-free.

I can report that the 7 per cent alcohol isn’t obviously apparent. As IPAs go it hid the alcohol reasonably well.
However, given the difficulty of getting my hands on a can of this (I had to order it through Slowbeer in Melbourne) I didn’t find the flavour of Aooni good enough to go to that trouble again.