I brewed a variation of my 8 Seconds lemon wheat. (Basically that recipe but I zested some mandarin oranges instead of lemons for this batch.)
Ok, so here is the rundown of the first HERM system run.
First off, I went through a ton more propane than I needed too because I didn't restrict my mash tun flow enough so the wort was flowing through the HLT so quickly it didn't heat as well as it could. (I corrected this by the time mash out came around but by then... I'd wasted a ton of energy trying to get the strike water to temp.)
I clamped every hose line except 1 apparently. It seems during my test it was confirmed that I need a heat shield below the lower HLT coil input. It became hot enough to compromise my hose so I had to take it off and cut it and re-affix. (I added a trailer-park heat shield IE tin foil.) Problem is I failed to use a hose clamp on the reattached line and about halfway through the mash I suddenly have wort spraying everywhere. Turned off the pump, re-attached the hose and only lost a bit of wort, but still a mess and kind of a '*******' move.
I was able for the most part to keep the temperature up. It dropped once to around 144 because I had turned my HLT temp down and had shut off the pump in order to keep the temp from rising too much. I got the temp back up within a few minutes and we were pretty smooth sailing from there out in the mash.
I vorlaufed about a gallon of wort after the mash, although I'm not sure that's necessary with a HERM process since wort is constantly recirculating through the grain bed. I did it anyway, rather do more than less, I suppose.
After the vorlauf, I drew about 1.5 gallons or so from the MLT. Then I reattached my pump-in hose to the bottom of the HLT and used that water for a couple of batch sparges. Worked like a dream. In fact the one negative I did have was that I was so excited doing the sparges that I got a bit too much wort in the brew kettle. I was planning on 7 gallons, but actually extracted closer to 7.5 (oops, need to get used to the pump and how much water I'm putting in. I don't have a sight glass on my HLT yet so it's hard to tell how much you've added to the sparge.)
Anyway, took a reading on the 7.5 gallons of pre-boil wort and it was an abysmally low 1.015. I added a bit of cane sugar to get to a more respectable 1.020 (It turns out this was unnecessary. I lacked faith and as we shall see, I was punished.)
Because I had so much extra wort it increased my boil time by about 40 minutes. (Planned on boiling for an hour, initially.)
By the time I got down to my fermenter volume of just over 5 gallons I was registering a hydrometer value 1.070. This will likely cause my alcohol content to put me out of style range for my wheat beer. That doesn't bother me overmuch except that essentially the recipe is wrong because I jumped the gun instead of doing the math to see what the likely gravity reduction would be after boiling. Again, in my best Red Foreman voice... "*******."
So, after cooling the wort, I transferred to my fermenting vessel. (That's hi-fallutin' for carboy.) I used the old fish-tank aeration method to get some air in the wort while I zested three mandarin oranges and boiled the zest and pulp in 3 cups of water for 5 minutes. I then took strained that liquid into the wort, pitched my yeast starter and lugged the behemoth down into my basement.
As of this morning I have a happy ferment going. We shall see how it turns out in 3 to 4 weeks. I'm going to let it sit in primary for about 10 days, then I'll zest some more oranges and 'dry hop' it for another 10 or 15.
Then, off to the keg for a week or so and I'm trying my first mandarin wheat.
All in all, had the normal hiccups and screwups you'd expect. I timed things alright given the fact that I wasn't heating strike water as quickly as I could have. That gave me time to grind the grain though, so no loss there. The pump, connections and hoses worked perfectly. There was a slight issue with the silicone tube inside the HLT. When I doughed in, apparently the stirring 'buried' the hose so part of the re-circulation had heated wort going lower in the grain bed than I wanted but I fixed that pretty quickly.
Aside from the hose popping loose, things generally went very well. We'll see how this batch turns out.