FUBAR Cream Ale

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Soooo, I decided to try my hand at all grain with a BIAB cream ale based off of BierMucher's Cream of Three Crops recipe using Death Brewer's excellent BIAB instructions. However the best laid plans of mice and men...
Here's what I was aiming for.

5 gal final batch size
Grains:
6# 2 row pale malt
1# flaked maize
0.5 # flaked rice
12 oz clover honey at end of boil
Hops:
0.5 oz Cascade whole hops 7.4 AA 60 minutes
0.5 oz Willamette whole hops 4.8 AA 10 minutes
1/4 tsp Irish Moss 10 minutes

My mash went well. 2.6 gallons water, 163 strike temp, 153 after dough in. So far so good. After 20 minutes I checked again temp 158, yikes, I wanted to mash low for a dry beer, my target was 150. I stirred and gradually added small amounts cold water to get down to 150 (about 2 liters added). Let it mash for 90 minutes and it came down to 147 at end of mash. Ok, still within tolerances. I sparged using the tea bag method with 3 gallons at 170. Because I am stovetop brewing I opted to divide my wort between two 20 L kettles. My stove normally has no problem bringing 3.5 to 4 gallons to a boil but I guess dividing between 2 burners neither one got as hot as I would have liked so it took a long time to get both slowly boiling. Then Murphy's law took hold.
I had divided my 1 oz hops bags into two bowls intending to save half of each for another beer. Instead I dumped one bowl into each pot doubling my hop bill. I didn't realize this until moments after adding the Willamette flavoring hops. I flamed out 10 minutes later completely forgetting my irish moss. I had thought, as I was going, that my boil off was going to be more than planned but after cooling I only had 3.5 gallons wort, way less than anticipated. (I spilled a little while cooling in the bathtub) It was at 1.055 well above my target 1.040. I crunched the numbers by hand and with BeerSmith and got 69% efficiency, not too bad for a first try. I diluted to 5 gallons with cold water that I poured into my brew kettle with all the hops and trub to try to get as much out of it as I could and then siphoned into my fermenter. I hit 1.040 spot on at 5 gallons. I don't think this will be a cream ale with all those hops but it might make a very light colored APA. Here are my questions.

1. Did I mess it up by adding top off water to an all grain brew? I haven't seen any AG recipes calling for top off water.
2. Did I mess up by running my top off water through the trub and hops? I thought it might extract a little more sugar but now am second guessing that I just added a bunch of extra trub to my fermenter. Definitely going to secondary this one.
3. I have two yeast options - I could ferment on the cake from a moose drool clone done with white labs british ale yeast or I could use a packet of Safale 05 dry yeast, not sure which to do with this.

At least it will be beer. I think I will RDWHAHB while it cools a little more and then pitch later this afternoon.
 
One week fermenting at about 65-68 degrees (swamp cooler) and it still has a creamy 1 inch layer of krausen on top. Gravity down to 1.005. Extremely cloudy. Taste is good, slightly lemony to grapefruit flavor (probably from cascade hops), but not too hoppy. Here's to hoping it will clear in a few more weeks, if not I will secondary.
 
I hate to leave a thread hanging. At 4 weeks this beer had a crusty white film on top, obviously infected, suspect it had lactobacillus but cannot be sure. Not to be deterred I racked from underneath into a carboy and let it go another 2 weeks. The carboy also quickly developed a white fissured skip on top. It did not taste good, but was not clearly bad either, very grapefruity. After reading so many threads about infected beers turning out alright I bottled it and hoped for the best. At 3 weeks it was tart but drinkable, so I drank most of it. I wish I hadn't. A few more weeks in the bottle and a few days in the fridge transformed this beer from iffy to superb. The grapefruit flavor backed off considerably but retained a crisp citrus bite. The beer was crystal clear, pale straw colored, dry, crisp, and refreshing. I was expecting the infection to cause a skim in the bottle or at least a ring, I got no such thing. The yeast settled out and firmed up so much I could pour the bottle to the last drop and not have a trace of cloudiness. The only thing better than sharing this brew with my friends and family was seeing the look on their face when I showed them what it looked like prior to bottling. Thank you HBT for giving me the confidence to give this beer a chance.

Infection.jpg
 
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