First partial mash - your thoughts appreciated

AS prologue to this post, I live in the Caribbean, where the only beer available commercially tastes pretty average. There are no home-brew stores, and no raw ingredients readily available. I ordered a recipe for Australian Golden Ale (I am Australian) from DeFalcos in Houston for a friend who works in the gulf to bring back through customs.

He turned up with 5lbs of light malt-extract, 2.1/2 lbs of un-cracked malted barley - 1/2lbs were Cara-Pils), 1oz of Hallertauer & 1oz of Northen/Hallertaun mix hop pellets, 1 pack of burton water salts, 1 pack of Bru-Vigor and WhiteLabs liquid yeast.

Here's what I did.

Mash-
2.1/2lbs were added to 2.1/2 ltrs of water at 150oF on stove-top (135oF starting temp). After 30mins keeping close eye on the temp, added 1.1/4ltrs of boiling water to get the temp up to about 155oF. After further 45mins raised temp to 158oF for further 10 mins, then cranked it to 170oF for a couple of minutes before sparging with 7.1/2ltrs water at 170oF. (I used a large collander / sieve to sparget he grains).

I then got the brew boiling then added the 5lbs of malt extract, along with 3./4lbs of Demerara sugar (the recipe mentioned 1lb of white sugar - but I wanted a lower alcohol content and lighter beer, plus I had a lot of Demerara in the kitchen).

Boil-
Put 1oz of Hallertauer in at the start of the boil (sitting in muslin on the side of the boil), after 40mins added further 1/2oz. of the North/Hall mix, then a further 1/2oz. for the last 5 minutes of boil.

I brought the wort fown to pitching temperature (70oF) by immersing the brew-pot in a kitchen sink with ice water, then drained the cooled wort through a sanitized strainer into the fermenter (plastic with air-lock) before pitching the yeast and adding the Bru-Vigor.

I decided not to use the Burton water salts, mainly because I am not familiar with them, nor what they would do to the bottled water I was using.

It has been happily fermenting for the last week and I am planning to bottle next weekend (2 weeks in total - could wait longer if there is a convincing argument- I really want to get this stuff bottled!!). The recipe has the OG as 1054, FG as 1012, but considering I used slightly less sugar during the boil, and my cracking of the grains was probably not ideal, I am not sure what the actual OG was (I didn't have a hydrometer to use - trying to source a battery hydrometer currently - don't be too critical, it aint easy to source equipment out here).

I am planning to use 3/4cup of corn sugar as priming sugar prior to bottling, but have not used this before.

This is my first attempt at partial mashing / extract brewing, andmy first brew after a few years away from this great hobby.

Any thoughts, criticism welcome.

Cheers

Well just first off, as far as Burton Water Salts are concerned, they are pretty useful if you want to brew a pale ale or ESB clone of something from the Burton On Trent area of England (i.e. Bass Ale) For more see here

The corn sugar will be good for priming, and it sounds like you did well! Until you can try it, RDWHAHB!! Let us know how it tastes when its done!