Citra Down Smash IPA
Red Truck Beer Company Ltd.

355ml can, a single from their 'Hop Pack'. Good for them. One hop, one malt. gotcha. And how many million yeast?

This beer pours a crystal clear, pale golden yellow colour, with three fingers of puffy, barely rocky, and somewhat bubbly bone-white head, which leaves some random hanging archipelago lace around the glass as it evenly bleeds away.

It smells of bready and doughy caramel malt, rather pungent red grapefruit and blood orange citrus flesh, a further indistinct tropical fruitiness, some damp minerality, and more leafy, weedy, and piney green hoppiness. The taste is grainy and crackery cereal malt, a mixed domestic fruitiness, still hard to discern exotic frooty notes, wet stone paths after a hard rain, and more earthy, musty, and sort of dank piney hop bitters.

The carbonation is adequate in its palate-supportive frothiness, the body a solid medium weight, and mostly smooth, with some of the inherent characteristics of the Citra hop not exactly playing nice with the local scene here. It finishes on the dry side, encouraging one to take another gulp. Neat trick, if you can pull it off.

Overall - for the one hop, and one malt variety, this comes off pretty damned well, in that I could mindlessly down a sixer, at a beach house, or whatever, but given the current state of things, I am just happy to have the one, and enjoy it for what it is - an inexpensive, yet well-made SMASH IPA.