Learn from my mistakes . . . .

Chances are that all of you are not as brainless as me, but I’ll post this for information anyway. I had this fear that grain was getting up under my false bottom, so I took a round piece of screen and covered the base. May be a good theory, but it was one of many blunders in yesterdays brewday. I ended up with what I thought was a stuck sparge, but the false bottom and grain bed were fine. The screen was getting sucked up into the false bottom tube and got clogged in that small 3/8” diameter opening preventing the wort from flowing. (Well, it did flow, just really really slow.) You can see the dark spot in the center of the screen in the picture below.

Here’s another hint. If you are doing a low temperature rest, don’t pre heat your tun with 140 degree sink water. I found my mash temperature actually rising as the mash progressed. Had to add cold water to stabilize it. Not only did this thin the mash, but I screwed up when recalculating the next step and came up low for my saccrification. Should had decocted, but instead added more hot water, diluting the mash even more. Added rest time to make up for this. Next came the stuck sparge. Took over three hours to drain. At this point I was pissed and started drinking heavily. Put the pot on the burner and went in for another beer. Looked outside to see massive foam spewing out of the pot. After turning down the heat it looked like all my hops were spread out over the deck in a sticky mess. Ended up a gallon short on my volume so topped of with even more water.

There were so mistake here that I hope I learn from, but somehow after all this the efficiency still hit just over 75%

Can't wait til next weekend!

Wow, that's crappy. I know firsthand how changing up your routine can lead to problems. My method for getting my wort into the fermenter is to cool it down in the kettle, then dump it into a big old stainless kettle that has a false bottom and a spigot. I position the spigot over the strainer funnel and voila! The false bottom catches leaf hops and that bed of hops acts like a pre-filter which helps keep the funnel screen from clogging quickly.

So one day I decided to see what all the whirlpooling hoo-ha is all about. 30 minutes later, I'm pissed off and dumping wort directly from my 15 gallon kettle into my funnel a little at a time.

Yeah, some grain gets below those domed false bottoms sometimes. It's no big deal. That sucks with the screen, though...something I'd never thought would happen.

I use a stainless false bottom like you and have thought the same thing because I saw bits of grain husk in the runoff but it was just because I crush so fine. The answer was to recirculate more time until this stops and runs clear. It will run clear if you give recirculation enough time.