My JerryRigged AG setup-Comments, suggestions?

So I tried my first attempt at AG brewing last weekend with a liberty cream all kit from Midwest. I live in an apartment so using a propane burner for the full boil is not practical for me. I built a rectangular mash tun and batch sparged. I split the full boil between two pots, a 16 qt and 20qt. Turns out they definitely did not hold 16 and 20 qt. I ended up using 3 gal for strike and I sparged until I had 5 gal pre-boil. After boiling and splitting the hops between the two pots I had about 4 gal. I then added ice to both pots to cool the wort (still working on making my Immersion chiller). Can anyone see any huge problems with this method?

I wouldn't say they are huge problems, but your efficiency is going to suffer since you are limited on the amount of sparge water you can use. You are also not going to get great hop extraction because of the density of wort in the boil pots.

I guess you could over come the second by boiling your first runnings from the mash in one pot and the rest in the other and add your hops to it since it won't have as high of a gravity. You will just have to use more grain to hit your OG since your efficiency won't be that great.

You need to increase your wort volume. You absolutely want to end up post-boil with as close to 5 gallons of wort as possible. You want to use as much sparge water as possible so you can rinse every bit of yummy goodness out of your grain. You certainly should be able to boil at least 6 gallons across these 2 pots and maybe even 6.5 gallons. So I would encourage you to sparge more & boil more.

I used the 2 pot boil technique for years until I got to move outdoors with a turkey fryer. The basic set up should work perfectly great for you. Just be sure to increase your water volume.

My SG ended up being 1.049, actually higher than midwest said it would be (1.044-1.046). I haven't calculated my efficiency but with that SG I don't think it ended up being terrible. I should note I did approx 3 separate sparges of about 4L each, since I only got about 2 gal from my strike. (Grain bill=9.5lb)

Considering your circumstances, I think you are doing great! You could try staggering the boils by 20 - 30 minutes allowing some time to cool the wort in a water bath, either in the sink or a tub. Even 10 - 20 minutes sitting in a cool tub / sink of water would knock out a portion of the heat so you would use less ice.

I've never tried it, but you could give "fermcap s" a try. I'ts an agent to reduce the possibility of boilovers. Might allow you to increase your boil volume w/out making a mess. Some on here love the stuff. Might be handy for a small pot stovetop situation.

In addition to adding ice directly to the wort I also placed the pots in an ice-salt slurry. I'll have to tell you how it turns out.

On my first batch ever when I was in college I added ice to my cooling wort in order to drop the temperature faster. As soon as the ice hit the wort my roommate asked me if that was purified ice. I shrugged my shoulders in ignorance and he gave me this look like I just killed his favorite dog or something. The beer fermented, we bottled it, and three weeks later we tasted it and it was some of the worst beer I have ever tasted. That was over a year and a half ago and I'm not sure what ended up happening to any of those bottles, maybe they're amazing now, who knows.
My question to you is the same my roommate had for me, was that purified ice you put into the pot?

It has crossed my mind to throw ice in to cool, but I didn't want to lower my gravity let alone risk infection but I was watching an episode of good eats last night about making beer.

Alton was correct on a few things but butchered most things. Here is the episode.

[ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vlv1wBy7Z5w]YouTube - Good Eats S6E7P1: Amber Waves[/ame]

[ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HA7jQ6Wwnqk]YouTube - Good Eats S6E7P2: Amber Waves[/ame]