Inage Beer, the brewpub and in-house brewery in Chiba's Inage district, has introduced this year's lychee beer in an Instagram post.

According to the brewery, the idea grew out of customer comments about how delicious seasonal fresh lychee can be. The team experimented with fresh lychee last year, but said that making a beer with fresh fruit is still difficult. This year's version uses lychee concentrate instead. The base beer is a pale ale, and the brewery also chose a yeast it had never used before, one described as bringing out tropical aromatics.

The finished beer is described as opening with a burst of lychee aroma that rises through the nose. It leans a little richer in flavor, with slightly higher alcohol content, but still keeps a bitter edge that reads as beer. The brewery even used the word "juicy" in its notes, while also wondering whether the profile is best described as tropical.

In Japan, the rainy season can also feel like lychee season, and Inage Beer seems to have framed the release around that timing. For a brewpub that brews locally in Inage, the beer reflects the kind of seasonal trial and error that often defines small-scale craft brewing: taking a familiar fruit character and translating it into something that still tastes distinctly like beer.

The post also mentioned the day's tap list and noted that one beer ran out, prompting the brewery to reconnect a small amount of last year's "Boso Oukan." It is a snapshot of a neighborhood brewery balancing regular offerings with seasonal experiments, while keeping the line-up moving on a busy day behind the bar.