Thank You & Notes on first All Grain Marathon

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bighandsray

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Cheers to everyone for your wisdom and sharing experiences, especially Bobby M and all the you tube vids.
For the last couple of months I have been scaling up from stove top PM with 3 and 5 gal coolers to now keggle and full cooler batch sparge with an insanely powerful banjo burner that nearly melted my garage door on the test run.

So saturday I set out on what would be your typical first AG day. 10 gallons of Sierra-ish clone and 7.5 hours later I was done.

Corona milling 18lbs took twice as long as I would have liked but atleast I remembered to start the sparge water.

Batch sparging went pretty well except I think I was a bit light on the total volume collected. Looked to be around 11.5g. By the end of the boil I came up with roughly 9.75g. Was hoping for 10.5 but not too bad. Increased my OG to 1.062 and was shooting for 1.058. Nothing wrong with a bit more alcohol. SS braid functioned very well. Good flow, nice clean run off. i think I could have stirred more with the initial addition of sparge water. I was hoping for better efficiency than 72% not a big deal. I was concerned about losing too much heat and having things get sticky. Mash temp was 154 and not knowing how well the cooler would hold the heat, now I know, stir more.

IC worked great for the first 10 to 15 mins but really plateaued. I made a rib cage looking thing with an awkward bottom but it was not sitting well b/c of the dip tube. Top 1/3 was out of the wort. Need to compress it a bit. Maybe shape modification.

Worst part of the day was when I went to open my shiny stainless valve to drain the cooled wort and nothing was flowing. I made a dip tube with a SS braid and hoped a whirl pool would get done. No chance. After doing much research and not finding a fool proof method I am going to try something a bit different. I am going to make a dip tube that extends to the wall of the keggle and slightly upward. I will make it out of flex copper and just tight fit it, no solder. Once I have drained off most of the wort I will be left with 2 gallons in the keggle. I will remove the diptube and and drain the remaining wort thru a paint strainer. It only took me an hour to siphon out and run all 10 gallons thru the one strainer anyway. I think I will buy 2 or 3 strainers and rotate and rinse them as I go.

Best part of the day was remembering that someone here said about having a bucket of sanitizer ready all day. This advice turned out to be gold. When you don't have all the bugs worked of your system at least you can sanitize them with a bucket of idophor.

So thanks for all of your help and if you made it thru the entire post cheers.
 
An efficiency of 72% on your first ever brew is fantastic. 20 brews in I am only about 75% but what I'm producing is nectar and I get my grains cheap so it's not a big issue. Top marks. :)
 
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