Another good beer from Deya. Orange and pineapple aromas and flavours. Enjoyable, refreshing beer.

Orange, grapefruit and pineapple aroma greets the nose and accurately advertises the taste to come. Hazy and light in colour. Soft soft soft in the mouth, medium body with a smooth and hefty hit of citra with a curious variation on that theme.. Deya are my favourite brewers to date and it was one of their beers that set me on the path to craft town! I can count on them to dish out the goods and it's a (all to rare) pleasure to order a box full of brews from them. This brew is made for efficiency by using Spectrum and Incognito, both derived from citra hops and both of which produce flavour with less losses in the brewing process. Hop forward is what I and many of us love, it's the name of the game really for the craft. And by using these products deya has tried to ensure its still there without going all in on whole hops. Maybe it holds this beer back. Spectrum Citra is new to me and turns out to be a liquid used in the dry hop. Revolutionary it may be but it's not whole hops, it's a devised product. It's essentially hop extract and leaves me unsure. Single hop citra brews are amazing and unmistakable and Birth of the Cosmos has that but in a different manner. It seems using Incognito and Spectrum serve to allow using pellets and no whole hops, which is fine, but I wonder if it's this efficiency method that's resulting in a less pronounced and fresh citra taste. You'd think extracts would be concentrated super citra flavour, but it's not the same. Dealing with massive amounts of whole hops (and pellets) for the boil and dry hop is terribly inefficient and costly. Is it this that's got a certain finesse you can't get from hop extract products? I don't know, I'm no expert and this is my first time experiencing it. Drink beer fresh, craft mantra. Is extract fresh? All that said, Birth of the Cosmos IS a nice beer, successfully packed with flavour and aroma. It's just for me it's undefined compared to other deyas I've had before like 'Saturated in Citra'. Sipping it now, having spent a while composing this, the flavour has subsided where as in other brews they progress. There's a dry finish almost exposing a sense of malt with resinous hop mercifully breaking out and coating the tongue leaving lovely citra flavour. Perhaps I've over thought it, it really is nice, but, again I'm unsure of the method. £4.50 for 6.5% IPA is on the cheaper side when you think 4-4.50 gets you a 4-5% pale and £6+ would be a hefty IPA or DIPA. Efficiency has its perks.