The brittle nature of hydrides impacts the integrity of fuel claddings in the nuclear industry. Extensive 2D characterisation has revealed that hydrides facilitate crack initiation and propagation. The impact of these hydrides is strongly dependent on their location and morphology, but the driving force for their preferential precipitation sites is not well understood. One hypothesis states that the anisotropic thermal contraction of Zr grains produces intergranular stress that promotes the preferential nucleation of hydrides. As Zircaloy-4 is a relevant alloy in nuclear applications and 2D analysis is limited in capturing the complexity of the intricate 3D structures of hydrides, 3D characterisation was performed in this study on recrystallised and hydrided Zircaloy-4, using 3D electron backscatter diffraction (3D-EBSD). As a proof of concept, a small volume of the microstructure was scanned at high resolution (voxel size = 0.06 x 0.06 x 1 µm3). A detailed 3D microstructure with high quality grain structure and crystallographic orientation data was obtained and used to generate a representative volume element (RVE) for Crystal Plasticity Modelling (CPM). The resulting RVE with experimentally measured Zr grains was imported into a CP model to simulate cooling and output the thermal residual stress. The results showed significant grain to grain stress variation, which highlighted the importance of considering the local stress generated in the microstructure during cooling in Zircaloy-4, as it might impact the hydride precipitation. Current work aims to correlate the locations of hydrides with the thermal residual stress produced during cooling in the Zr microstructure, using a larger 3D-EBSD dataset of 500 x 150 x 88 x µm3.