Old Bottle of Cat's Paw Pale

I'm sampling the final bottle of some 14-month-old pale ale. This is Cat's Paw Pale, named for the trusty hand tool. It's a little past its prime, but there's a lot of good stuff still going on. I based this on Smuttynose's Shoals Pale Ale and what it shares with that beer is a really firm, full malt base marked by more and darker crystal than is common--12 oz. of Crystal 120 for instance. It would be well worth repeating without major changes.

Or, on the other hand, I could redo the hopping just for fun, dropping Chinook and Cascade for, like, Warrior and Santiam or something. Usually I tend to be pretty restrained with the specialty malts in pale ales and the like, but this is a special case and it would probably be best conceived as a nice late fall seasonal--this'd be great after raking leaves on a chilly day.

I'm sick of not brewing. I haven't brewed in over two weeks, simply because of stress and paranoia relating to home ownership. Fuck that, man. I'm waking up early tomorrow and making the second version of my E.S.B. (Emergency Summer Beer). This was a beer I made up late, late last summer when we had a mysterious heat wave and I was pissed about having a bunch of Fall beers on draft. It was designed to be a U.S. Wheat beer, but hoppier and with rye. It was fucking great. The slightly re-touched second version will use a little more wheat to correct for my lousy wheat efficiency and will replace Newport with Perle for the bittering hop.