Well my Super Bowl brew day did not go as planned! First thing I did was select the recipe. Odd thing was that it did not give me the option to go into the Advanced Editor to verify the setup. Oh well, what could go wrong I say? Kick off the brew and went upstairs to make the dip and hot wings for the family to eat during the game...lost track of time and finally picked up my phone to check on the brew...it was doing a short Alpha rest. Oh crap!! I remembered that my last brew had errored out and I had gone in and truncated the brew to finish off where it stopped which was after Beta rest which was the majority of my mash period. Doh Doh Doh!! So I caught it after the mash hit 163 or so and enzymes were turning off left and right. Powered off the machine, reset the editor to do more than a 10 minute mash, and hoped that I had not denatured all the enzymes. So much for testing to see if the crush made a difference.
So things go well for a while, Falcons are playing great ball, food is tasty and the beverages aren't half bad either. Time to take a gravity reading before the boil. Now I bought a hundred syringes off Amazon and decided to use one of them instead of the "used" one from Pico. I noted that the new ones allow the plunger to come out, which I thought was much better because I could clean and dry them better, right? Right? Wrong! I screwed that puppy in, and the pump pushed the plunger right out and wort started squirting out the machine. I was NOT happy!
Quickly unscrewed the body from the machine and spent 5 minutes cursing and cleaning up sticky wort.
All went well, Patriots started their comeback ( I was kinda pulling for Ryan and the Falcons, but I do respect Brady's abilities...) finished up the food, put the dishes in the dishwasher, and went down to attach the chiller. About 30 seconds in, one of the hoses blew off the chiller and I had another mess to cleanup.
At that point, I gave up on the whirlpool, gave up on the chilling, and like the Falcon's defense, I let the machine beat me. Cleaned up my mess, put the sealed keg in a bucket of water in the garage, cleaned the grains and hops from the machine, and did a deep clean and rinse. Tomorrow is another day, and I will redo this experiment again, having learned 3 new lessons. Man, I love brewing!!
Cheers!