#springfest

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