Just bottled the latest batch of homebrew. In a nod to one of my favorite warm weather beers, Hoegaarden, I brewed up a Belgian Wit Beer, or white.

Now I was just shooting from the hip with my recipe and my improvised batch likely will not in any way turn out like my favorite spring and summer tipple or even like the mass-marketed, bland brew known as Blue Moon.

Early samples of my beer, however, do have some of those herby and funky notes with traces of citrus in the finish that are the hallmarks of the lighter Belgian beers but the color is a little dark. In terms of overall body and taste, this will actually be the lightest beer I’ve ever made. The alcohol will probably finish in the 4 or even 3.5 percent range. I only used two ounces of hops and that is a quarter of what I usually drop in a batch. Like a lot of homebrewers, when I started this hobby all the brews I wanted to make were super hoppy IPAs that blasted the senses with hops and high alcohols. This current batch represents a departure from that style and I’m eager to see how it finishes.

Another experiment with this batch is I’m using carbonation tabs instead of mixing in liquid priming sugar. Carbonation tabs are little pieces of sugar that look like Altoids. You drop a few in each bottle and supposedly can have more uniform and lively carbonation. Bubbles are a crucial part of the beer experience and especially for Belgian ales that need a lively splurge of bubbles in the pour to bring out all those wonderful flavors. In all my other batches, I’ve dissolved varying amounts of priming sugar and just mixed it into my bottling tank.

This beer, which I’ve dubbed my Funky Barnhouse Belgian, could be pretty damn good or rather weird and flat.

Kinda like those European exchange kids we all remember from our high school days. Some were the coolest cats you ever met, others were just flat out weird.