This latest batch is a little different from any other beer I’ve brewed, mostly because it’s the first time I’ve tried making beer without a recipe.

Usually, I think of a beer I’d like to drink, google the name of it, and click through the various recipes until I find one that sounds like it’s not too difficult to make. This time, I started with the idea that I’d like a light beer, not very bitter at all, and with the citrus flavor that a lot of summer beers have, so I googled “citrus hops” and found that the hops that would give me that orange-grapefruit flavor were Amarillo, Cascade or Centennial.

Then, I googled recipes that had those three hops in them to see how other people went after this idea. The recipe that intrigued me the most was one that was loaded up with ten pounds of malt extract! I’d never brewed a batch with that much malt extract in it, and for that reason alone I decided I had to try it.

Ever since I’d started thinking about this citrus-y, malty beer, I’d wanted it to have a taste like a saison or a Belgian, and although I had no idea if the combination of hops and all that malt would work with that kind of yeast, I figured the only way to find out was to give it a try.

I had a little trouble remembering to buy all the supplies at once last time. Specifically, I forgot to get yeast and had to make a second trip, so this time when I walked through the front door I went straight to the fridge and picked a packet of Wyeast 1214 Belgian Abbey out of the bottom tray.

There are two separate fridges at the store where I buy my supplies, one for the yeast and another, right next door, for the hops. I took two steps to the left, opened the other door and flipped through the bags until I found the Cascade pellets. They were rated at just 6.2% alpha acid, so I bought two ounces. I wanted to finish with Amarillo hops, which were rated at 9.3% alpha acid, so I bought just an ounce of those.

The store sold malt extract in three-pound bags, so I bought nine pounds of light malt extract. I had a half-pound of crystal malt left over from the previous batch and decided, on the fly, to throw that in there as well for color.

The next day a plumbing emergency almost derailed my plans to brew, but I finished playing with the pipes at about four o’clock and figured I’d have just enough time to brew if we didn’t want to eat until six-thirty. My Darling B happily agreed, so I set up the Cajun cooker in the garage and started a pot of water boiling with the crystal malt hanging over the side to soak.

By the time the pot came to a boil I had all the other ingredients prepared and was relaxing in one of the Adirondack chairs I’d dragged around from the back of the house. After dangling the barley over the pot for a few minutes to let it drip, I set them aside and poured the malt extract in, one bag after another, enthusiastically stirring to keep from scorching it on the bottom of the pot. I had my doubts that I would even be able to dissolve that much malt into 2.5 gallons of water, but I did, and never even came close to burning it. As it was coming back to a boil, I fetched the wort chiller from the basement and, after dipping the coiled copper into the simmering wort, turned up the heat to speed things up.

When it came to a boil again just a few minutes later, I added 1 oz. of Cascade hops and let them boil for 20 minutes, then added a half-ounce of Cascade for another 12 minutes, and then another half-ounce of Cascade for 12 more minutes. Finally, I dropped the last sock stuffed with 1 oz. Amarillo hops and let them boil for just 12 minutes before shutting the burner down and hurrying down to the basement to connect the wort chiller to the faucet in the basement sink. While the chiller was madly exchanging the heat from the wort and flushing it down the drain, I strained the hops and set them aside, then distracted myself by watching videos on YouTube for about ten minutes, more than enough time for the chiller to bring the wort down to a temperature that was nice and cozy for yeast to settle down in and raise a family.

The stick-on thermometer on the side of the carboy indicated a temperature of about 68 degrees, which should have been well within the tolerances of the Belgian Abbey yeast I pitched into the soup, so I don’t think that should account for the slow start. The original gravity of the wort was 1.076, probably the highest OG I’ve ever started with but still not, according to many of the recipes I’ve googled today, unusually high, so I don’t know how to explain why it took so long for the yeast to get going, unless that’s the way they always get going. They looked just about dead this morning and I worried all day that I’d come home to find the same tonight. Happily, that wasn’t the case. At about five-thirty this evening, the fermenter had a frothy head on it that reached almost all the way to the top of the neck, and by the time we finished dinner there was foam climbing up the blow-off tube. At bed time, fermentation had earned the honor of being characterized as vigorous, with plenty of foam collecting in the big one-liter beer stein at the other end of the blow-off tube, which was happily bloop-bloop-blooping. With a feeling of great relief, I went to bed.