Urban sprawl

Florida brewer Cigar City provides the beers today, and a lot of them at that, across a happily diverse range of styles.

On the lighter end, we have Paloma Gose at 4.2% ABV. This differs from the classic Leipzig recipe by dropping the coriander and, in line with modern craft takes, adding fruit -- grapefruit and lime in this case. It's a hazy orange shade in the glass, with not even a suggestion of a head on pouring. The aroma is very soft-drink-like, a Liltish citrus-meets-sugar effect. You get the soft and briny texture of a real gose, and a salt dryness that helps offset the sodapop sweetness, though only a little. This is very Lilt-tasting, leaning towards syrupy in the foretaste before a super quick finish. Of course it's meant to be thirst-quenching, and it is, but as with sugary soft drinks, the days when I could neck a few in sequence are long gone. I appreciated the childhood charm of this one but I couldn't make a habit of drinking it.

There's more fruit and more salt in Citrus Siesta, though the brewery is calling this one a golden ale. It's not golden, more a coppery amber colour, and still modest in strength at 4.5% ABV. Outdoor summer drinking is still the use-case, I guess. It smells nicely fresh and zesty, with the orange coming through strongest. Perhaps the lime would show itself on tasting. It does, but only a little: it's that concentrated, almost herbal lime-peel effect, and then merely an echo of it. The rest is very plain: a little orange cordial in the finish, but no flavour contribution from the salt, malt or hops. The texture is quite nice -- it's big-bodied and satisfying to quaff, with a honeyish feel even if the flavour isn't there. That wasn't enough to endear it to me, however. When you insist on using novelty ingredients they need to make themselves felt more than they do here.

Invasion is called a "tropical pale ale" but this one doesn't have any daft ingredients, unless you count Motueka, Galaxy, Simcoe, Pacifica and Amarillo, all of whom sound perfectly reasonable to me. A hazy orange in the glass, it smells funky and dank, with heady aromas of sandalwood and incense. The flavour is sweeter. That spicy wood thing is still there, but it's joined by a hard grapefruit bitterness and a lighter fruit zest set on a honey and biscuit malt base. That sounds busy but the texture is light so it gets away with all of it without becoming difficult. It's possible to enjoy this on the Sierra Nevada level as a tasty resinous bitter American pale ale, but it has a fun extra dimension as well that I really enjoyed.

The sole dark beer in today's set is Cubano-Style Espresso, and although it's a brown ale it's very dark indeed, almost but not quite black. The lack of a head wouldn't qualify it for porter or stout status and the rich coffee aroma certainly says it's a brown ale. It looks thin but it's not, thanks to the inclusion of lactose which, in conjunction with cacao and vanilla, gives it a milk chocolate foretaste on a creamy mouthfeel. That's nicely balanced by the coffee, which is strong and heavily roasted, bringing a grown-up bitterness to an otherwise candyshopped beer. The seesaw of sticky sweet chocolate and clean dry coffee is rather enjoyable. This is another beer with an understated complexity. It's only 5.5% ABV but is deliciously full and warming. One to come back to in winter, perhaps.

The upper echelons start with Tocobaga, a 7.2% ABV red IPA. It's not my favourite beer style and it looks downright ugly in the glass: a swampy red-brown with some disturbingly big floaty bits suspended through it. The aroma is much more attractive: Citra bringing a fresh and zesty kick, backed by a little toffee sweetness. Dirty look vs clean aroma: who wins? The look, unfortunately. There's an immediate grittiness on the first sip, accompanied by a dreggy yeast bite. The hops are in rapid pursuit, however, bringing an astringent lime-rind bitterness, with a fun twist of pink peppercorn. It goes a little grassy towards the end, suggesting dry hopping that's gone on too long, and that's joined by a tannic rasp indicating that the mash too was not quite right. After the poise of the previous beers, it's weird that this one is so rough and amateurish. It's not unpleasant: big hops and big malt mean a good time is had, but at the same time it's strangely blurry round the edges which I would not have expected from a tight ship like Cigar City. Moving on...

Space Pope is our finisher: always good to see a Futurama reference in a beer name. It's the same strength as the last one but looks much happier: a bright amber gold. Our hops are Mosaic, Citra, Galaxy and CTZ, which hop-doctor Google tells me is a blend of Columbus, Tomahawk and Zeus. All of that gives us a very pleasant mix of the fruity and the bitter. Both aroma and flavour have the classic pithy grapefruit kick we all come to American IPA for, but with a lighter side of tangerine and mango, all of it sprinkled with resinous weedy fairy dust. It's very obvious that this has been assembled in the same house as Jai Alai, in that it offers a very similar approachable punchiness. It's an excellent expression of the classic American IPA style, or "west coast" as we're now obliged to describe it, even though that's very much not where it's from.

They're a decent bunch, in general, with just one out-of-character misstep among the six. As usual I'll give a particular endorsement to the darkest one and request more along those lines in the next shipment from Tampa.