Just finished brewing this one. Probably shouldn't have picked it for getting back into the game after 2 months of not brewing.
Bumped the 2-row to 18lbs because I brew 6 gallon batches.
During the mash, I had trouble with my RIMS pump sucking air half way through. Eventually traced it to a bad seal on the QD coming from my mash tun drain. During the process temperature of the mash dropped really low. Got temps back up and mashed out.
Had to do a second fly-sparge... ran out of sparge water (dang this beer is thirsty), and had to heat up more. Stirred the mash and re-circ'd at 165 untill second batch of sparge water was heated. Sparged about 11 gallons of wort total, stopping when I hit around 1.015 from the mash tun. This resulted in a starting gravity of ~1.070 (770 points --> 1.128 OG at 6 gallons). Looks like I hit 87% efficiency.
Temperature outside was too cold for my burner to get a solid boil in my keggle. Drained into my HLT and put it on the stove inside. No where near the boil I normally use, so I let it go until I reached about 7.5 gallons, then started my 90 minute (I almost always boil 90 minutes) timer. Probably a total of 4 hours at a low boil.
Hops from the LHBS were at 8.9% and 5.6% AA respectively. With the OG projecting to be higher than expected, I ran with the original amounts. BeerSmith says 105 IBU's for a .872 IBU/SG ratio, pretty close to the recipe.
Finished the boil with 6 gallons and enough for a 1.2 liter starter (pulled 15 minutes into the boil, so 1.070). My refractometer was giving inconsistent readings, but 1.120 OG is looking correct. Since I moved inside, I did a no-chill and will pitch my starter tomorrow.
Starter consisted of all the US-05 I washed from a 5 gallon batch of cream ale. Should equate to about 4 packets of yeast.
EDIT:
Three hours later
All in all, it was a success... but the process resulted in one of the longest, most painful brew-days I've had yet... and I still haven't gotten around to cleaning up my equipment.
. Brewed 4/6/14, primary for 1 month, racked to a keg and tucked it away in a corner of the basement. Completely forgot when it was but threw it on gas maybe a couple months ago probably when I was cleaning out the basement. Today I needed space in the keezer for my usual spring rotations and found it in the way so I bottled it into a bunch of 12oz and 1L bottles I had around. Took a brief look at my brew notes out of curiosity and couldn't help but laugh. Turned out to be a great beer, I definitely need to brew this again soon so I can forget about it and enjoy it a year on down the road. Just hoping for some colder Denver nights where it's actually appropriate, we won't have too many of those left anytime soon.
