Life begins at...

Sierra Nevada celebrates 40 years in business this year, something that must be extra poignant given the rate at which first-wave American craft breweries are selling their credibility or just plain going out of business. The beer to mark the occasion is 6% ABV and amber coloured with a slight haze. The aroma is definitely old school: crystal malt and Cascade, like American beers used to be, out on the craft frontier all those years ago. Hops dominate the flavour: lime citrus, turning to slightly harsh wax. There's a floral background too, the hops providing a mellow balance that one would normally look to malt for. It's fun: punchy, loud, and hop-forward in an old-fashioned bitter way. It's not massively different from the brewery's flagship, but I regard that as a point in its favour.

Even with 40 years on the clock and nothing left to prove, Sierra Nevada can't resist a brand extension or two. Hazy Little Thing has been one of their more recent success stories and where do you go from there but up. Presenting Fantastic Haze, a double IPA version. It's 9% ABV and a medium hazy yellow. The aroma is understated: just a hint of tropical guava and maybe a squeeze of grapefruit behind this. Neither side of that equation is represented in the taste. The base is heavy and thick, and the flavour riding on it is a fruit salad of pineapple, grape, mandarin, apple and strawberry. The syrupy texture helps that dessertish effect along. There are no extremes here: the heat and the sweetness are kept within approachable boundaries, and with these edges smoothed off it risks blandness. It's not bland, though. There's enough going on here to keep the drinker interested, even if it's not the intense experience that New England-style IPAs from smaller brewers offer. That may be bad news for some, but I don't miss the garlic and caraway that the others too often show. This is decent, competent stuff. Sierra Nevada's IPA reliability strikes again.

A few weeks after that landed we got Hazy Little Thing - Session Edition at just over half the strength. It's quite a wan, sickly colour, though the tall head of foam is handsome. The aroma is middle-of-the-road: a wisp of herbal dankness and some worrying savoury garlic. The mouthfeel is quite thin, even for 4.6% ABV. So that's all the bad things out of the way before we come to the flavour, which is magnificent. Fresh and squashy mandarin juice is the opener, then a spritz of lemon zest to provide a token bitterness. The juice turns sweeter and is joined by the fizz to make a quality bitty orangeade effect: Orangina comes to mind specifically, bringing with it sunny holidays in France. I miss the substance provided by original HLT, but this version really does not taste like a compromise.

An odd joint effort next: Triple Hop'd Lager was created with Sierra Nevada as collaborator at the unlikely host Bitburger, mainstreamest of the mainstream German lager factories. The result is 5.8% ABV and... no: that's the sum total of information the exterior of the can provides. For something bragging about the hopping, and less than two months in the can, it smells powerfully of malt: quite a sticky and worty aroma, of cookies and golden syrup. A slight waft of lemon is as hoppy as it gets. The body is very full, unsurprisingly, removing a lot of its lager feel. Meanwhile the flavour is a gentle blend of weedpatch noble hops and American citrus, neither in full voice. I feel a bit gypped that it's more like an ale than a lager; big and chewy. There's nothing very special in the flavour and I'm glad I didn't buy the full sixpack some off licences were insisting on, as drinking one was hard enough work. This is passable but nothing special.

We go out on a big one. Too big for me, actually: my wife sprung €10 for the can and kindly donated a taster to the blog. It's a Barrel-Aged version of Narwhal imperial stout, given the bourbon cask treatment. A favourite feature of basic Narwhal is the hopping: a bitter, metallic clang in the finish, and that seems to have been a victim of the barrels here. Instead you get bourbon up the wazoo and a square of chocolate on the side to distract you. In my original Narwhal review I mentioned that it tastes barrel-aged to begin with, and it turns out that actually doing it doubles down the booze and vanilla, resulting in something tasting even stronger than its substantial 11.9% ABV. A soy-sauce autolysis twang finishes it off and doesn't improve the picture any. It's not a bad beer, just not an improvement on basic Narwhal, and there are plenty of better examples of barrel-aged imperial stouts available, including from Irish breweries.

Here's to 40 more years of safe and reliable hop-driven beers. The world will always need them.