Tasting: Galaxy Pale Ale

So the ill-fated Galaxy Pale Ale is now mostly in bottles. It's tasting pretty good although it isn't what I intended at the time. Fortunately I made several mistakes instead of just one. Each one added up to leave me with a beer that's somewhere in the Pale Ale/IPA vicinity so it's worked out well enough.

Galaxy Pale Ale

Aroma: very aromatic, floral, fruity, with a 'sharp' passionfruit aroma. It actually smells very similar to my Baby IPA which used Nelson Sauvin and Amarillo together. I'm quite relieved that it lost the 'dirty tea towel' smell that it had when I bottled it.

Appearance: pale golden colour, slightly hazy, 3cm head that left some lacing.

Flavour: assertive bitterness, some maltiness but it's largely buried in the hop flavour. The similarities to the Baby IPA continue with the hop flavour. Some citrus, some passionfruit, some resiny kinds of flavours.

Mouthfeel: the carbonation is just shy of medium and it suited the beer very nicely. It'll probably carb up a bit more, I'm drinking it with only 13 days in the bottle. It's quite dry and suits an IPA or Pale Ale pretty well.

Overall: Well, this isn't the beer that I intended to brew but it's still ok. Not amazing, but decent. If I was going to brew it again as a Pale Ale, I'd probably try to squash some more malt flavour into it and add some other hop varieties. This was my first time using Galaxy hops and they haven't wowed me. They're nice enough but not really doing it for me in a single hop beer.

As an experiment, I saved 5l in a glass jar and added some WY5112 Brett Bruxellensis to it. It's sitting in a dark cupboard and I'll see how that's doing in a few months.