Happy early turkey day!
It’s not original, but I’m very thankful for being able to wake up and see my wife and daughters every day, and good friends to share a pint and a laugh.
If you can ramp up the temp you may be able to get a point or two more, but if you mashed that high with a heavy specialty malt grain bill, you may not get much more.
And I would not recommend champagne yeast.
If they are the little tan ones, I would spend the couple dollars extra and get the 24v. I use a 12v for mash recirculating and it's just fine, but if you try to whirlpool or anything the extra power is beneficial.
And listening to Marshall at NHC, I actually felt like his biggest goal was to get others to experiment and lay out how a test can be executed between variables.
They do bring up good topics to think about, and try. I came to the realization that my issues are not reeeeaaaally with Brulosophy, but how others interpret what they are doing.
This is my biggest problem with Brulosophy. It is a single data point, not proof.
People need to experiment on their own. When Marshall first started his blog, I had hopes that is what would happen, but people just took it a new dogma without recreating the study.
Probably the OP's best bet, and it is probably the second least complicated considering their goal. (the least complicated probably being something like the trub dam on the kettle port)