Little by little

Looks like it's time for me to get my Little Thing out again. The latest in Sierra Nevada's seemingly endless variations on its signature hazy IPA is Citra Little Thing. As usual, the can is most uninformative, beyond the ABV of 7.5%, but the brewery website tells me it's not a single-hopper, the Citra joined by Simcoe.

It's reasonably hazy, though not the full-on beaten-egg emulsion you get from the more extreme practitioners of the art. It smells reasonably juicy, though with more of a fruit candy vibe than actual juice: Skittles, Starburst, that kind of thing. For all the alcohol, the flavour is quite muted, I thought, and there's none of the hop vibrancy I had been expecting. You could argue that Citra is famously bitter so might disappear in an IPA designed to be sweet, but you'd be wrong. Plenty of breweries use Citra for this purpose to excellent effect. This seems like a big industrialised brewery low-balling the hops for budgetary reasons. For shame, SN!

That said, it's not a bad beer by any means. There's a pleasant light zesty kick and some deeper, slicker resins in the finish. It's extremely easy to drink. The problem is, I didn't come to a 7.5% ABV American IPA for easy drinking. While I recognise that west-coast punch isn't part of the offer, the absence of juice and fruity hop fun is a major black mark. Maybe I can't complain when I only paid €2.50 in SuperValu, but I'm complaining anyway.

It strikes me that naming hop varieties is a means to extending this series even further. Citra was a reasonable place to start, but I hope the next ones will be more interesting.

Meanwhile, the change of season brought out Sierra Nevada's Springfest IPA. This looks light and breezy, being a pale gold and perfectly clear. It's a full 6% ABV, however, and has the malt substance to back that up. On top of that are the hops, and it's very much in the Sierra Nevada style, which is to say old-fashioned but delicious. The varieties used are Centennial, Citra and CTZ, and they give it quite an intense lemon flavour, concentrated like meringue pie filling, and with a raw rind bitterness on the finish.

All of that makes it invigorating rather than refreshing; while it may be presented in easy-going sessionable terms, I'm not sure it would work as such. There's a fair bit in common here with the brewery's flagship pale ale, although the lack of any dark malt component makes it something different. Both beers share balance, drinkability and an assertively punchy hop-resin taste. Exactly what I'm after from Sierra Nevada, for the most part.

Finally, a pils, of all things. The name, PILS, sets down a marker that this will be definitive and no-nonsense, and I'm very much of the opinion that that's how pilsner should be done. I've not seen it in cans, but Tapped had it, er, tapped, in late February. Full marks for another flawless gold colour and long-lasting fine foam, although the latter could stand to have been a bit thicker: I blame the made-for-UK imperial pint glass for that. There's a suspicious fruit quality in the aroma; not unpleasant, but not pils-appropriate, suggesting modern craft's peach and apricot rather than herbal greenness. Sure enough, that proved to be the centre of the flavour as well, which had me running to the brewery website for a hop-related explanation.

Here I found the beer described as "Pilsner as it should be," and also that it's made "with an innovative twist." You can't have it both ways, lads, unless you think the Czechs have been doing it wrong. I couldn't find a hop listing among the marketing guff, but they do say it should taste of "citrus and tangerine", which is a long way from pilsner as it should be, in this critic's opinion. I give them credit for the beer's texture: the carbonation delivers optimal crispness and the body has the weighty, creamy density of the very best pilsner (*cough* Keesman *cough*), but these are also features of good pale ale, and that's what this tastes like.

I'm whining a lot here, so I should add at this point that it's a beautiful beer: tasty and subtle; supremely sessionable at 4.7% ABV, though only for plutocrats at €8.70 the pint. My only real bug is dressing it up as though it's an authentic expression of Europe's lager-brewing tradition. Maybe that flies for beer drinkers in California or North Carolina, but it doesn't here. Of all the breweries in the US, Sierra Nevada is the one with least need to pretend to be something other than itself.