Easy company

Sierra Nevada's Hazy Little juggernaut rolls ever onwards. After the double iteration and the session iteration, now we get the soured fruity iteration. Does anyone else suspect they're associating beers with Hazy Little Thing purely for marketing reasons? Wild Little Thing is a long way from New England IPA. It's barely even hazy, for one thing, appearing no more than a misty shade of pink in the glass. The aroma is all sweet and no sour, with strawberry concentrate and tropical guava driving that. Strawberry dominates the flavour, though in fairness to it, it's tangy rather than jammy. There's a ripe and tropical richness behind this, and I was hoping for a proper sour spike in the finish but instead it tails off into watery fizz. This is more an alcopop than a beer, and unworthy of being part of the Hazy Little Thing brand extensions, or even the Sierra Nevada line-up.

I bought it in the expectation there would be more Sierra Nevada beer along soon that I could build into a blog post. Several weeks later there was no sign so I gave up and revisited one from an established American brewery to bulk out the post.

An IPA at just 4% ABV? Wow! The Yanks will have mastered the English IPA style in no time at this rate. Lagunitas Daytime session IPA is a crystal-clear pale yellow with a tall stack of stiff froth looking, well, like a perfectly poured glass of Heineken. It used to be 4.6% ABV and full of lemon sherbet. Now the flavour is big on onions, red ones in particular, finely sliced and fried. It's the kind of thing that's enjoyable as a side dish, but being given a whole bowlful to chomp through is a chore, and that's what happens here. There's really very little else going on in the taste; after the onions it tails off and leaves you with more onions in the aftertaste. On the plus side it's not thin or watery: I think American breweries tend to give up on texture when they get down to these low ABVs, but the mouthfeel it has just gives more leverage to them onions. A hard pass on this one.

Both breweries are better than this, and its especially disappointing that Lagunitas changed Daytime for the worse. Never fear, I have a stack of new beers from Odell, New Belgium, and whatnot in the fridge to try. They won't let me down, will they?