A severely out of range ph can effect conversion to some extent, but in general water chemistry has more to do with flavor than efficiency.
LHBS milled the grain and don't know what the crush size was. The filter in the MT was the paint strainer bag from the depot, no braid or manifold. How would I know if there were dough balls in the bag in the mash tun. I am not BIAG, just put grain in the bag and put it in the MT. After lautering into the brew pot added 2 pounds 8 ounces of DME into the wort, stirring so the DME did not clump up. There was no sediment in the pot after wort was transferred to the primary bucket so don't think the DME clumped and went to the bottom.
Hope this help you see where I screwed up.
The main thing that jumps out to me is that you never truly doughed in. The grains need to be stirred when added to the water, vigorously and for several minutes. They also need to be stirred again after sparge water additions. By simply placing the grain bag in the water you essentially had one giant dough ball, and the grains in the center of the bag could have been completely dry for most or all of the mash.
I am not BIAG, just put grain in the bag and put it in the MT.
I assume you mean BIAB (brew in a bag), but if your grains are inside a bag for the mash, that's pretty much the definition of BIAB.
The grains were in a bag so moved the bag up and down in the cooler as stirring was not an option.
If stirring is not an option, you need to seriously rethink your process. You're not supposed to tie the bag shut when doing BIAB, the bag just acts as a filter. The grains need to be doughed in regardless of the type of filter you use to separate the wort from the grains. What you're describing sounds more like the process used for doing extract brews where small amounts of specialty grain are steeped to add flavor. In that situation, the grains are only expected to add flavor, not any significant amount of fermentables. It's also done with much smaller amounts of grain, so the risk of a doughball forming in the center of the bag is much lower, and less of an issue if it does happen. As you've discovered, this process does not work well for partial mash or all grain brewing.
What does it mean if the grain bill was tiny?
He was saying that a strike temp of 160F sounded very low, and the only explanation for this that would make sense is if there were only a few #'s of grain, which would not absorb as much heat.
The mash temp was 150F but added boiling water and brought mash temp to 155F. Had heated MT before adding grain and sparge water (160F) but still lost 10 degrees.
This confirms the previous posters thought that your strike temp was too low. You never doughed in and therefore the temps never equalized throughout the mash tun at the start of the mash, so really you don't even know what your mash temp was. Had you stirred the grains and doughed in properly, you would have seen that the strike water cooled even more than 10F when mixed with 8# of room temp grains.
I sparged by covering the grain in the HT for an hour, then drained. When water got to top of grail, filled up cooler MT to the top and repeated process until 6 gal went through MT. Is that batch sparging or fly sparging?
Sounds kinda like a hybrid fly sparge from your descriptions. If you mean you covered the grains in the mash tun full of water and let it sit for an hour, that's called the mash, not the sparge. Sparging is rinsing the residual sugars off of the grains after the mash is over. Batch sparging is draining the wort from the mash, adding all of the sparge water in a single addition, stirring, vorlaufing, and then draining (quickly). If you split the sparge water into two additions, it's called double batch sparging. Fly sparging is where you very slowly let the wort trickle out of the mash tun while slowly sprinkling the sparge water on the top of the grain bed at the same slow rate the wort is flowing out.
Hope this is helpful.
