Two beer brew day - The good, the bad, and the ugly

Started this morning at about 9am with a robust porter and at 4:45, I am halfway through the boil on an APA.

The good:
I hit both gravities on the nose - back to 75% efficiency after my last batch sinking into the upper 50s. First one today was fly sparged and second was my first try at batch sparging.

The bad:
I was hoping to post some pictures, but my digital camera died two hours in.

The ugly:
I forgot to hook up the elbow on my sparge tank on batch #1 and it stopped with 2.5 gallons to go. I tried to put it on with water still in it and got a bunch of grease from my wrench into the water, so I dumped it and heated 2.5 more gallons.
My propane tank ran out during boil #1. Of course, my back up was empty.
Boiled over both batches bring them to a boil. For the first time ever, also boiled over 40 minutes in on batch #1 and probably lost some amount of hops.

BTW, here are the recipes.


Porter

9.00 lbs. British Pale Malt(2-row)
1.00 lbs. Munich Malt(light)
1.00 lbs. Crystal 60L
0.75 lbs. Chocolate Malt
0.50 lbs. Black Patent Malt

OG: 1.062

1.25 oz. Goldings - E.K. Whole 6.90 AA% 90 min.
0.38 oz. Goldings - E.K. Whole 6.90 AA% 20 min.
0.37 oz. Goldings - E.K. Whole 6.90 AA% 5 min.

IBU: 40.0

White Labs WLP002 English Ale

Qts Water Per Lbs Grain: 1.20

Saccharification Rest Temp: 152 Time: 60


APA

10.50 lbs. Pale Malt(2-row)
1.25 lbs. Crystal 40L
0.50 lbs. Aromatic Malt

OG: 1.057

0.20 oz. Warrior Whole 17.50 AA% 90 min.
0.50 oz. Simcoe Whole 12.00 AA% 20 min.
0.33 oz. Amarillo Gold Whole 8.00 AA% 20 min.
0.33 oz. Summit Whole 17.00 AA% 20 min.
0.50 oz. Cascade Whole 7.80 AA% 10 min.
0.50 oz. Simcoe Whole 12.00 AA% 10 min.
0.33 oz. Amarillo Gold Whole 8.00 AA% 10 min.
0.33 oz. Summit Whole 17.00 AA% 10 min.
0.50 oz. Simcoe Whole 12.00 AA% 5 min.
0.33 oz. Amarillo Gold Whole 8.00 AA% 5 min.
0.33 oz. Summit Whole 17.00 AA% 5 min.
0.50 oz. Cascade Whole 7.80 AA% Dry Hop
0.50 oz. Summit Whole 17.00 AA% Dry Hop
1.00 oz. Simcoe Whole 12.00 AA% Dry Hop

IBU: 55.1

WYeast 1056 Amercan Ale/Chico

Qts Water Per Lbs Grain: 1.14

Saccharification Rest Temp: 154 Time: 60

Nice work.

When you going for 3 in a day.

orfy said:

Nice work.

When you going for 3 in a day.

Click to expand...

LOL, I'm still recovering from yesterday.

If I were to do this again, I would need either a helper or some extra equipment or both. It took 9 hours with an hour lost due to the propane running out and the missing elbow on the sparge. My sparge kettle is also my brew kettle, so the problem came in when I finished sparging brew #1 and would normally transfer back into the kettle to boil, but also needed to heat mash/sparge water for batch #2 so that it could be mashing when Batch #1 was boiling. I had to hold it in buckets, heat my mash water, clean the first mash out of the mash tun, then put it in there to sit. Then I transfered batch #1 to the kettle to boil, but now I have nowhere to heat sparge water.

This seemed more like a chore than fun, so a helper or more equipment would ease the burden a bit. Given what equipment I have, what I may try to do given the coordination issues I described above is do a partigyle, maybe an old ale and a bitter. Anyone with good experiences to pass onto me?