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I brewed a tea beer not long ago with 20 tea bags worth of earl grey added at flameout. The aroma was great.

Yeah, you could replace all of it or just a portion of it depending on how much you want to reduce the roasty flavor.

If you're trying to design a beer that looks like a stout but lacks the strong roasty flavor, you might try replacing some of the darker malts with carafa III, which is dehusked/debittered black malt. It seems like your recipe is not trying to showcase roastiness, and that flavor would really...

It would be one thing if the kegs were from a small microbrewery trying to make ends meet, but we're talking about Anheuser-Busch. They can certainly afford to spot you a few kegs. It's the least they can do for stifling the creativity of the American beer industry lo these many years.

Some off flavors will fade with time, but I don't think the soapy flavor is one of them. I don't think there is anything you can do short of mixing it with another brew to dilute the flavor, but maybe cutting your losses is preferable.

Your water absorption seems right on line with me, don't worry about that. Your low efficiency is definitely down to your sparging technique. When I used to do one big batch sparge of 5+ gallons, I would get 60-65% efficiency. When I split it into two equal sparges, I ended up jumping to 70-75%...

Not a lot of benefit to going over 170 though, is there? Better rinsing of the grain bed maybe? But we're talking about fractions of percents, if that.

So what's the science behind this? How does black malt help with clarity?

Hop tea is still an option if you really want to follow the spirit of the recipe in terms of bitterness.

One thing you could try is doing a batch entirely from bottled water. Do the same batch and see if it comes out different. Another way to go if you ruled out water as the problem is hop bursting: http://www.mrmalty.com/late_hopping.htm

So you pulled a decoction, brought it to boiling, returned it, and the temperature was lower than you had calculated? It's either the result of heat loss in the mash tun, or you didn't take out enough for the decoction to reach the right temperature.

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Open it up and smell it. If it smells healthy then you're probably okay.

Well, if it was me, I would use a lower grain/water ratio to save more water for the sparge, then I would sparge twice instead of once. At least that way you can dilute the wort trapped in the dead space.

I was thinking that the more grain you drag with you, the more potential sugar you'll have in the decoction, which, once unlocked, will keep the pH safely below tannin extraction range. That wouldn't matter after the main mash has gone through the saccharification rest because the pH has gone as...

Whenever you see instructions for decoction mashing, they always say to remove the "thickest third" of the mash (meaning mostly grain) because the thicker it is, the less susceptible it is to tannin extraction.

I go with decoction just because the calculation is more intuitive than infusion of boiling water. Remove a third of the mash, bring to boil, return, temp goes a third of the way to boiling. 125 becomes 154.

The topic of hot side aeration is hotly debated with no real consensus on the subject. If you're happy with you beer then you shouldn't worry about it.

I would be interested to know how you are able to pull those numbers with no sparge brewing. I know I couldn't do it. ;-)

Well, for one, in the case you describe there would be no sparge. You'd be looking at 60% efficiency at the very best. Your HLT holds and heats your sparge water to rinse the grains of any residual sugars after the initial mash.