First extract w/ grains brew, done!

So my first brew was a Nut Brown Ale prehopped LME kits with Corn sugar as a fermentable. It's not great... A little flat, kind of cidery and a bit sweet.

My second brew was bottled today, an Amber ale from a pre-hopped LME and some DME added as a fermentable, and dry hopped. It tasted pretty good going into the bottles.

My third brew is an Belgian Wit extract with specialty grains and hops. I'm hoping that everything is okay, but I have a few questions:
1. There was a lot of floating crap in the wort, and i couldn't filter it out very well (tried cheese cloth on the auto-siphon, with little success), so there's lots of bits of hops, coriander, and orange peel in the primary right now. I presume I'll need to rack it to a secondary to clear that crap out? Any other suggestions to keep the sediment out of the wort? lots of hop bags?

2. I ended up with less wort than I anticipated. We boiled the hops, extract, adjunct (belgian candi sugar), and spices in a pot with about 6 pints of water, then cooled it by adding more cold water. We siphoned it into the carboy, and added cold water until we got close to the SG (1.051). I think we hit about 1.048. The only problem is, there is less wort than I've had in the past. I knew that hitting the SG was more important than volume. Was that because of the stuff left in the bottom of the pot? (we stopped siphoning the last bit of wort because it was so full of sediment). I also used DME instead of LME, converting using the 0.75 LME = 0.6 DME.


The recipe that I used: https://www.homebrewtalk.com/f71/easy-belgian-wit-28370/

Thanks! You guys rule.

How short did you come up? My friend and I have made about 6 extracts, and 7 or 8 all grains. Since you were going for SG and not volume. Also remember your SG will read lower at higher tempetures, so make sure you are measuring at fermenting temp, or use a calculator, I like the one at beer recipator site. You might have come up low because you didnt get all the extract syrup in. Letting it heat in hot water before, and "washing" inside of container with hot wort, or extra hot water helps get all that syrup out of there. If you cut short the steep, or missed the temps on steeping the specialty grains you might have come up short also on SG. We always just topped up the ale pale to the 5 or 5.25 gallon area, and usually hit in the ballpark for gravity on our extract kits.
As for crap floating in the wort. I wouldnt worry about it too much, it will settle to the bottom of the fermenter with the trub and yeast. You think a little stuff floating is bad, do some all grain, whole hop, full boils. Can be intimidating.

Actually, thanks for mentioning the temperature of the reading. I converted it and found that we hit our SG (1.051). I'm not entirely sure how short we were on wort - there was a bunch (maybe 1/2 gallon) left in the pot after boiling, but it was so full of crap that I left it. The wort at that point was at 1060, and I added water (probably about 3 pints), which brought it down to 1051 corrected.

Next time, I guess I'll use hop bags for those things, to help get as much wort as possible out of the pot... btw, we were using DME on this batch. I calculated that I needed 5.28lbs of DME to match the 6.6lbs of LME. I hope that was right!

Thanks!

I dont use hop bags, even with whole hops. Im new at the game too. But with my all grains. I get alot of crap in the boils. I just use my autosyphon to suck out the stuff, I dont worry much what it picks up, as if its solid, it will sink. If you dont have autosyphon or racking cane, you can always pour through a strainer, to get the big stuff out. Anything that makes it past those, will not be a problem. After a week or so in primary all junk is at bottom. If you secondary, you have even less to worry about. All my beer has come out ok, with minimal sediment. All that sits in my secondary is yeast, which is needed for bottle carbing, so I dont mind that it gets sucked into bottle bucket either. Dont get me wrong, you dont want a bunch of crap in there, but dont worry about a little stuff here and there, as it will sink out, and if its after boil, its sanitary, and shouldnt bother anything.