Everything went well today; except frequent equipment malfunctions and a mild case of food poisoning.
In between running to the bathroom every 30 mins, I ground the grain and hit my mash temp of 148 perfectly. An hour and a half later, I am able to go back and do a starch test and realize I forgot to add the corn. It had been left in the freezer, it was infested and I didn't want them spreading to my other grains. After adding the corn and readjusting the temp, I waited 30 mins and came back with a negative starch test.
And then promptly ran into my first stuck sparge, corn is so much fun. I didn't even run into a stuck sparge when doing honey wheats, though I used rice hulls then. The corn smell is something else, kinda like a microwaved bowl of corn-pops.
The boil went perfectly. I don't remember who mentioned squirting the hot break with cold water, but that worked like a charm. My brew buddies showed up at this point so they can brag about the beer we make and then left 45 min later.
Chilling was fine, took 20 mins with my immersion chiller, got down to 80 degrees. I started to fill the fermenters when it got stuck again. I have had problems with protein buildup in my boil kettle, it has got to the point where if I don't treat it with a long soak of PBW it becomes stuck. My autosiphon is broken, so I broke out the old racking tube and filled the fermenters.
And then noticed that my starters have had no activity in the last six hours. Checked the expiration date on the yeast that I bought Wednesday, it had expired back in March. My LHBS is really starting to piss me off. Pitched it anyway.
The gravity hit perfectly, 1.050 at 80 degrees. Unfortunately, all I could taste was roasted barley when I took a sample. I still don't know how malty this will be.