Not so great AG first time, but bonus 2nd batch FTW!

I broke in my new Home Depot mash tun today, and was stoked for most of the way. As expected, nothing worked out quite as well as I had planned, except the end result ended up better than I had ever imagined- 7.7 gallons is in the basement fermenting away!

I have a lab thermometer and didn't even notice which side was Fahrenheit until after I had mashed for 60 minutes... which was actually at ~140F. ARG! I nearly fell over when I realized my mistake. I had already collected 1.5G of wort that came out to 1.032...I turned the propane up to 11 and heated up some water in a hurry and eventually got a thin mash up to 150F... I figured it wouldn't hurt to try a 2nd time!? So after much vorlaufing, I started getting clear wort, and filled up my kettle to 7G. After some on the spot calculations, it looks like I got 60% efficiency with a false bottom+badmash+badsparge. Not bad ! ANother beer for me. I threw in 1 pound of amber LME and boiled away.

And what to do with all that sugar that I couldn't sparge properly that is still in the mashtun (I had ~7G mash volume AFTER collecting 1.5G wort already)? I made up 2.5G with 2nd runnings and some amber LME that I had laying around. YEA! WORST BREWER EVAR! :cross:

All day has resulted in plenty of mistakes, lessons learned, and hopefully 2.5 gallons more beer because of the screwup! Hells yea!

The scale is in two digits, except for 100F and 200F which are explicit . So at 150F, it is merely labeled "50" . Other side is C, it just all looks metric when it is sitting in the mash .

You can't qualify as the WORST BREWER EVAH with your pot of second runnings. What you did was create a "Small Beer", which has been done for hundreds of years. If you were to ferment those second runnings alone (without adding extract), you'd get a beer appropriate for breakfast and lunch. It's the Miller Lite of the Middle Ages.

But way to go! My own first AG day didn't work out as well as I'd planned, either, and I too still got beer out of it!