WarEagleBrewer
Well-Known Member
Lemme tell you about my first all-grain experience....last night....and this morning. I order all the ingredients for a Guinness clone, build all my equipment and get it all ready to go. A buddy and his wife come over to have dinner and afterwards we get started. Time: about 7:30. My buddy got a huge (gotta be 15-20 gallon) pot and an enormous burner as a gift, so we decide this will be our boil kettle. We heat the water up for the mash (about 1.25 qt/lb...which seems to take a while. Finally, the water hits 163 degrees and we stir in the grains and water in the mash tun and let it sit for an hour. With about 20 minutes left in the mash, we start heating the water for the HLT, 5 gallons. Lets just say it took longer than 20 minutes....ALOT longer! SO after about a 90-120 minute mash, the sparge water hits 170 degrees. I had already recirculated, so we began the (fly) sparge. 5 gallons was BARELY enough sparge water, and an anticipated 45 minute sparge....took about 10 minutes. Obviously we ran the water too fast. BUT all is fine, we have 6 gallons of super dark wort that looks about like it should, so we start the heat to get it to boil..... Well...after ANOTHER HOUR...with the lid ON, the wort starts to barely roll...we give it another 15 minutes till we are sure it's boiling, add the hops, leave the top off, set the timer and go inside....watch some Turtle Man. With about 20 minutes left, we go outside and find.....the pot not boiling! At this point, it is 2AM in the morning and we don't know why the pot is not heating up like it should...so we get to looking at the burner. Apparently, you aren't supposed to use the metal deflector over the flame...because when we moved it out of the way and let the flame hit the pot....miracles! So we put the wort chiller in (to sterilize) and let the wort boil another 20 minutes. We then cooled down the wort...blah blah blah...finally got it in the bucket. Took a gravity reading before we pitched the yeast and low and behold we hit the EXACT gravity predicted in the recipe. We also had EXACTLY 5 gallons of wort. I'm not sure how this is going to taste with so much going wrong, but the final wort volume and gravity reading gives me a little hope. All this because we didn't slide the little metal piece out of the way of the burner....go ahead and say it...MORONS!!! I got to bed at 3:30AM and I had to be at work today by 9! I think my buddy called in sick. Any opinions on how BAD I may have screwed this up are welcome! NOT a pleasant first all-grain experience....