Boiled a few grains...

When pouring the grain from a bowl into my muslin bag, I spilled a few (15 or so) whole grains into the boil pot. I decided not to take them out. They were boiled with the wort for 55ish minutes.

How terrible is the beer going to taste?

It depends how good a brewer you are and how good the ingredients are.
But the 15 grains will have nothing to do with it.

Oh no!!! Man, that's going to be some nasty stuff!!! You had better just toss it now!

I'm just kidding. Your beer will be fine and taste great, assuming that you did everything else right! You will not notice any astringency from such a small amount of grains left in for the boil. It's good that you acknowledge that the presence of grains during the boil is not a good idea, but you have nothing to worry about.

Yeah, I'm not optimistic about the batch anyways, it's probably going to be really odd (I only used 4.3lbs of extract, and I sparged 1.25lbs of 80L malt from ~135-165F over the course of.... 10 minutes, total volume 4.5 gallons). There's some wheat extract in there, and I used Safale-04, so.... who knows! I'm still working on the basic process, not worrying so much about exact amounts of high quality ingredients or exact temperatures, and really just getting used to doing proper transfers with my gear. Racking to secondary was a bit rough (I hate stairs), and it's in a 6.5 gallon carboy, so there's lots of room on the top. There hasn't been any noticeable activity during secondary.

For my next batch should I:

1. Cool the wort in the kettle in the sink to nearly room temp, then transfer to a plastic bucket with cool water in it, then rack to carboy and pitch.

or

2. Cool the wort in the kettle just a wee bit, then toss it in to cool water in the bucket and rack to carboy and pitch.

I would cool it basically to room temp in the kettle. The plastic will not transfer the heat well at all, so if you are over 80 degrees, you will be waiting much longer. Are you pre boiling your top off water? You should.

It's bottled water, so I'm just trusting that....

...it's probably not the best, you're right I should boil it.

I'm thinking about buying or making a larger kettle so I can do full boils, but that would also mean that I'd have to buy a burner and a stand and a propane tank or something. At which point it's totally worth going all grain, and that's even more money... aaah.... The kitchen has it's appeal for now...

Crazytwoknobs said:

I sparged 1.25lbs of 80L malt from ~135-165F over the course of.... 10 minutes, total volume 4.5 gallons).

Click to expand...

You meant 12.5#, right?

haha, I wish... my language was unclear:

1.25# 80L (this is when the grains fell in and I didn't want to put my hand down in there)
3.3# Northwestern Wheat extract
1.0# Muntons Light DME
1oz cascade 45 minutes
1oz cascade 15 minutes
Safale S-04 (1 packet)
Total Volume 4.5 gal.

It fermented very well for the first 5 days, then slowed down a lot. The first few hours after I racked to secondary, it produced a bubble every two minutes or so, and I haven't seen a bubble since, but there's pressure in the airlock. It's been... two days since I put it in secondary. Since it was in a big carboy, and I had to carry it down some stairs, there was sloshing right after secondary.

its gonna be a really really light beer. what was the OG?

If my math is right about 1.037

Well, I'm not too worried about it. If it's bad, oh well.

Thanks for the help guys, you rock!