Alright, finally have time to recap here.
First off, thanks for all the help last night from those who responded here and the one guy I talked with in chat.
All in all things went alright. The stuck sparge was definitely unexpected and turned the night into a 6 hour brew from probably a 4.5 hour brew. I never did get wort to flow (I'll get to the issue later) so I had to improvise. I dumped the entire mash into two buckets then poured back into my boil kettle through a large strainer. I would pour until the strainer was full of grain, let it sit and drain for a few, dump the grain into another bucket, and pour again. I forgot about the sparge at first and tossed the first strainer full of grain into the trash. I admit I grabbed a hand full of "untouched" grain of the top and threw it back
, but it was mostly ruined. Then I dumped my volume of sparge water into the bucket with the grains, stirred well, and covered for 10 min. Strained that wort back into the kettle the same way. All of this made a
huge mess and I lost a good amount on the floor.
I'm guessing I had close to 6.5 gal of 120F wort at this point and it took my stove a while to get it up to a boil. After the boil started it went fairly well. I forgot to start re-hydrating the yeast early so when the time came I just sprinkled it on. By that time is was 4am and I was ultra tired. Ended up with 5.4 gal of wort with an OG of 1.057. I essentially had no MLT dead space anymore and with the slightly larger boil volume my stove had a hard time keeping up resulting in a lower boil off rate. After adjusting for batch volume the brewhouse efficiency was 67%. The wort was
really cloudy, but after sitting in my hydro tube for about 20 min it was already clearing up nicely. I think the whirlfloc will do it's job and I'll probably use gelatin anyway, just hoping I don't get any astringency from the small particle husk material that made it into the boil.
Now to the issue of the stuck sparge. During the boil I decided to trouble shoot a little and dumped the spent grains back in the MLT and filled with 5 gal of hot tap water. I stirred well and let it settle for about 10 min. Tried to drain and again, pretty much nothing. This water was cool enough for me to stick my arm in so I tried messing with the braid, even blowing in the tube and trying to feel where the bubbles were coming out. Couldn't even get a drop. I ended up dumping it and putting off the rest of the investigation till this morning.
Now, I put this MLT together about a month ago, so I had forgotten some of the build details, one of which turned out to be important. I decided to go with a compression fitting setup rather than the barb and hose clamp. I had read about people having issues with SS hose clamps rusting and wanted a cleaner install. I built what you see
here. When I originally freed the braid from it's maternal supply line I used a dremel tool which left the ends pretty frayed. I neglected to clean them up and ended up with what you see...
here.
You can see all the mash gunk that built up behind the "rat nests" but was hidden by the fittings. I washed out the braid and used wire cutters to snip the ends off clean and reassembled. It already drains water faster and I can sense the increased flow rate when blowing through the bulkhead. I'm hoping that was the only issue and my next AG will be problem free. Looking back it was an absolutely retarded thing to fold the ends in like that. I suppose I didn't anticipate the smaller particle material that would get through the braid but clog at a spot like that.
Live and Learn. Hopefully someone else can learn from this and live a little easier.
