Kitchen sink pale ale thing

Every once in awhile it's fun to throw caution to the wind and just experiment. Except for when I first started homebrewing and didn't know what I was doing, I've generally tried to adhere to style guidelines. That doesn't mean that Brewtoad always tells me that my recipe conforms to the style, but they seem to be in the ballpark.

So this was a fun beer just to throw together with spare ingredients that I had. A little of this, a little of that. Literally. This beer has six different malts in it. Some of which were years old (some two-year-old pale ale (uncrushed); three-year special roast and victory (crushed)). But the resultant beer seems to indicate they are no worse for wear.

I also had a pound of 2016 cascade hops that I bought from YVH last year. I was wondering how the roasty malts would play with the grapefruit flavors from the hops. And now I have the answer.

Appearance: Still cloudy. Red. Tan head.

Taste: Maybe a touch metallic. I was thinking blood for some reason. Which sounds strange but I think it's just the way the roasty malts interact with teh grapefruit and bitterenss and it's only slightly percepitble in the finish and not unpleasant. Otherwise, notes of caramel, grapefruit. Breadiness. Kind of hard to detect roastiness actually. Regarding metallic tastes, this is something I don't usually perceive in my beer, so I don't believe it's a water issue.

Overall: An enjoyable beer. If I were given this beer not knowing anything about it, I feel like I would enjoy it. Which brings to mind something I've thought of often about my beers. Sometimes I wish I could enjoy them as I would a commercial beer or another homebrewer's, i.e., not being involved in the process and knowing everything about it. The first taste I have of any beer is impacted by my knowledge of what went into making it. Sometimes I wish I could just taste them blindly and say, yes I like this, or no I don't.

Another beer that is long gone. In fact, I dumped the remains (maybe half a keg) last week when I kegged my October 2018 smash/helles. I dry hopped this beer and intended to do so for only a few days, but ended up dropping the hop bag to the bottom of the keg when I opened it. So every pour had some hop bits floating around. The worst problem is that it sat in my garage for the warm spring months and I think some refermentation occurred. It seemed to have a slight off flavor after that.