another "first all grain in the books" thread

[red96jeep]

so me and my brewing buddy decided we would start out the new year right with our first attempt at all grain brewing. we got a nice igloo 10gal cooler from home depot(for 30 bucks woot woot), as well as everything else we would need, and decided to brew a simple amber ale from northern brewer. overall it went pretty well our mash went good and we hit our temp of 153 right on the head(something i have to give credit more to the software we were using as opposed to our knowledge of what we were doing), the temps held well for the full 60 mins, but when we went to raise to mashout temps of 170 we undershot it at around 160ish, then batch sparged with 3 gallons of 160 degree water for 10 mins( i was a little unsure as to exactly what temp i should sparge at and for how long, any tips for future brews?). overall we had a mash efficiency of about 61%, pretty well all things considered i thought. we also came up with about a total of 5.5 gallons of wort collected as opposed to 6.5 suggested on the software, this was because as the sparge water was draining off it became questionably clear and i decided to cut it off early, should i just keep going next time until i hit my suggested volume?
the boil went as expected, had to add a little more water to bring the total volume up to about 5 gallons after a larger then expected boil off. final gravity 1.044 target gravity 1.047 pretty darn close in my book, im' pretty darn excited to drink this beer, and have to give thanks to HBT for helping me understand and get through it.

 

[kypher]

The temperature of the mash being at 153 is great, and congrats on keeping it steady for the full hour, but with the mash temp there's a lot more flexibility in terms of being able to miss by 5 degrees high or low, depending on the style you want to brew (as different temperatures extract different types of sugars). With the mash-out, you really want to be within 1 or 2 degrees of 170. The reason for this is that anything above 170 you will risk extracting tannins from the husks of your grains, but anything too far below that 170 mark and you eliminate the purpose of mash-out, to seize conversion in the tun.

As far as the wort running clear, I assume you've seen videos and read blogs and postings about how to batch sparge, so I won't go there. But the wort running clear is fine. And even if you don't think you're getting much extraction, you will just be adding plain water later on anyway to hit your target volume, you might as well let that water get into contact with some grains, ya dig?