Recipe
Not much to this recipe, really. In Brewing Classic Styles the all-extract lambic recipe comes from Steve Piatz, who not only brews award-winning lambics from extract but is also a member of my home brew club. It seemed only sensible to follow his example and go all-extract for my first lambic. I didn't use his exact recipe, though -- I added a bit of corn sugar. I did this simply so that I could use only whole 1lb bags of DME. I don't like keeping open bags of DME around.
Lambics usually use aged hops, of which I had none. So for this first batch I used Hersbrucker with just 2.3% alpha-acid. I'm going to set aside some hops to age for future lambics. I plan on brewing annual batches for at least two more years so that I start blending them into geuze.
Brewing
Haven't not brewed one since August 2010 I'd forgotten just how easy an all-extract batch is. Gather some water, dump in the DME, boil. Simple. It was a nice change of pace to have a brew day that took less than five hours. Although I quite enjoy doing all-grain brewing, I can see myself doing more all-extract or extract+specialty grain brews in the future. With a newborn in the house it's a lot easier to find 3 hours for brewing than it is to find 5.
Since this brew day was so simple there's not much to report. A heavy wind messed with my burner, leading to a lower evaporation rate, giving me more beer at a lower gravity (1.051-52 instead of 1.054). But other than that it was as simple as falling off a log.