New All Grain Brewers in Montana

My wife and I have been making "kit" wine for several years and just yesterday started all grain brewing. We got our Sierra Nevada Pale Ale clone in the fermenter yesterday and everything went pretty good for a first time experience. We had a few things come up that I would appreciate a comment on though.

- We overshot our mash temp target (153) and ended up at 158. We didn't know what to expect for temp loss from our Igloo cooler MLT so we didn't make any adjustments. To our surprise we only lost 1 degree in 60 minutes. Will this higher temp make my pale ale a "not so pale ale"?

- When continuous sparging it only took about 20 minutes to finish. Everything that I read says that this should be a 45-60 minute process. Will increasing the sparge duration increase efficiency? We calculated about 66% efficiency yeterday.

- We had planned to drain the brew kettle into the fermenter using the spigot but ended up with a blocked outlet due to a large whole hop. Instead, we ended up pouring all of the contents through a strainer into the fermentor. Is there a problem with this?

- We were shooting for 5 gallons of wort to get to the fermenter and only ended up with 4. We added water to get to 5 gallons. Is this a standard practice?

Enough questions for now. I appreciate any and all comments. Thanks.

Welcome
You should be fine, it'll just be a little "thinner" than you hoped for.
Make adjustments on the next one.

Sounds like a pretty standard run, to be honest.

Pouring the boil kettle into the fermenter through a strainer is standard practice, as long as your wort temperature was below 80 degrees. Otherwise, you risk 'hot side aeration', where oxygen binds to the proteins in the wort and releases later during fermentation, possibly creating off-flavors.

A slower sparge rate extracts fewer tannins from the grain, leading to less mouth puckering. What the heck am I saying, you're a winemaker, you know what tannins are!

Topping off with water isn't a problem. What was your OG? Close to what you expected?

hoppy, nice to hear from Montana. What part are you in? I'll be heading over from SE Wash. to Rock Creek (the 1 20 miles E of Missoula), Montana over the Memorial week. With the 158f you should end up with a lot more non-fermentables in the wort. Might be quite a bit sweeter and finish a bit higher.The closer to 150 mark will give a drier/lighter mouthfeel. But you will still have beer. Congrats and welcome again.

Even after our water addition our OG was slightly above that shown in the recipe. I believe we had 1.056 versus 1.053.

As to stale's question, we live just south of Missoula and have been to Rock Creek many times. I can only guess that you are coming to Rock Creek to fish the salmon fly hatch. We have floated the creek a few times during the hatch but high water made all but one of the trips a bust. But the one good day was fishing that most will only dream about.