Freeze right there

Is Sierra Nevada's ...Little Thing series of beers starting to run out of ideas? The preponderance of cryogenically frozen hop products is the hook on which they've hung this latest one: Cool Little Thing. For such a deep-cut, nerds-only, concept, you might think they'd put some factual information about it on the cans, but there's nothing. I had to go to the website to find out that cryo versions of Mosaic, Comet, Crystal and El Dorado are what's involved here. The end product is a sizeable 7.5% ABV, where some breweries might start calling it a double IPA.

It's a hazy orange in the glass, with lots of awkward foam making pouring go slowly. The aroma is very nicely juicy -- sweet jaffa, shading to mandarin -- with a lacing of sterner dank resins in the background. The texture is very definitely on the double IPA threshold, thick like an undiluted cordial, with the same sort of concentrated orange flavour. The juice is gone, as is the dank, leaving only a heavy sweetness and an unsubtle limey bitterness. It does not taste like the epitome of hop optimisation, even if it does smell a bit like that.

I chewed through my twelve American ounces of it without much else to note. It's a bang-average strong American IPA, and no more than that. Occasionally, the Little Things throw out something exceptional, and I had high hop hopes, but this isn't one of their best, at least by the time it cold-chained its way from North Carolina to Kimmage. I see "053024" printed on the arse end of the tin, suggesting it was less than three months old when I opened it. If the super-duper iceman hops aren't still doing the business within that timeframe then I don't see the point. A showcase for the technology it is not.