Okay it took a while to upload pics but here it is along with a brief synopsis of my brewday of EdWorts Haus Pale ale
Steps (as per my beersmith notes):
-Heat around 12.84 quarts water to 170F
-Put in 1TBL 5.2 stabilizer
-Pour strike water into mash tun
-Dough in slowly and stir thoroughly
-Hit mash temp (152F) with no necessary adjustments (lost about 3F throughout mash)
-Digital thermo stopped working, switched to analog floating one
-Add 7.4 quarts to 200F mash out water, stirred, and let sit for 10mins for a mash out temp of around 170F.
-Vorlof 2 quarts and collect 1st runnings (15 quarts).
-Add 12.4 quarts sparge water @ 170F. Stir thoroughly and let sin 10mins.
-Vorlof 2 quarts and collect 2nd runnings (12.25 quarts). Preboil volume=27.25 quarts (6.8G)
-Preboil gravity=1.045 (predicted 1.048)
-This is where things got tricky. I am slowly buying all the equipment needed to go AG and have yet to get a big enough BK, so I knew I was going to split the boil into 2 pots (or so I thought). However, being the idiot I am I didn't calculate that boil volume of my 2 pots and actually ran out of room and had to boil the wort in 3 pots! This probably let to a larger boil off volume but I still ended up with a little less than 5 gallons post boil so I'm not too upset. ---Boil 1st runnings in big pot.
-Boil 2nd runnings (had 2 split between 2 pots)
-Hop additions split between largest, and second largest pot.
-Put immersion chiller in pot at 10mins
-Whirfloc at 5mins
-Chill and pitch yeast (after rehydrated)
-Measured OG=1.047 (predicted 1.055, 61% efficiency)
And now the pics (sorry, old school iphone 3GS is all I got):
Heating up the sparge water, nevermind the temp, kind of pointless
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Hit mash temp spot on! (Although I lost about 3F during the mash, next time I'll either try to insulate the tun better or overshoot my target mash temp by a degree or so.
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Mashing away...
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Collecting 1st runnings
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Time for a hot scotchy (actually w/ whiskey but still tasty nonetheless, some fine oregon microdistillery action)
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No more pics until after she was in the carboy but there it is bubblin' away like a champ
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Random thoughts on the day:
1) I didn't take a pic of the crush but I have a feeling it was a little coarse which may have attributed to the low efficiency (although for a 1st timer I was perfectly happy with 61%).
2) Since I boiled my 1st and second runnings separately I wonder what (if any) effect it had on the final outcome. Maybe I should have mixed all the runnings together and then boiled so the 3 pots boiling had the same gravity wort
3) Fun as hell but I'm getting a proper BK stat (will be going with a cheapo 40qt one from amazon, what type of valve assembly would be most appropriate, full false bottom, dip tube? Any thoughts appreciated. Here's the link to the pot
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B001CHKL68/?tag=skimlinks_replacement-20