In 1994, Japan relaxed some of its strict tax laws surrounding the minimum amount of beer a brewery had to produce a year to get a licence. Before this, there was only a handful of breweries large enough to fulfil these requirements, but the much lower requirement introduced allowed for smaller craft brewers to get involved. As such, more and more craft breweries continued to pop up alongside the small number of big breweries, many of them having experience in brewing from producing sake.

While the beers from these microbrewers were popular in Japan, it took a short while for them to begin being exported to other countries, with Hitachino Nest being one of the first.