First All Grain batch- Success! I hope...

[PhlyanPan]

So I did my first all grain brew today using the beer in a bag method. I mashed with 4 gallons in my cooler with 11 pounds of grain in a jumbo grain bag. I hit my temperature of 155 initially but within about 10 minutes it had dropped to about 150, where it remained for the rest of the hour. Not too bad I hope...

Then I batch sparged with 190 ish water...about another 4 gallons. Then strained the whole lot through another mesh bag.

Did my boil...4 different hop additions in a hop bag, Irish moss. All good. Then put the chiller in and brought her down to 75. Almost to temp, the tube popped off my chiller and dumped unsanitized tap water into my beer that I just spent hours mashing and boiling.

Now we have a pretty substantial water treatment system here at our house involving a water softener and additions of chlorine and some sort of acid. So I'm hoping no infection will result. But the lesson here is USE CLAMPS ON YOUR CHILLER!

The other thing I wanted to ask was if I was computing my brewhouse efficiency correctly. Here's what I did:

11 lbs of grain X 36/5 gallons into the fermenter =79.2
OG was 1.052 (1 point off of my anticipated OG according to the beer recipator). So then I did 52/79.2 to get 65.6566% brewhouse efficiency. Is that right?

 

[Greenglass]

I had a leak appear on my chiller earlier today also, although it wasn't as serious as the tube actually coming off. It was still at a high temperature, though, so I'm not worrying about any contamination.

I wouldn't worry too much. Difficult to tell, but I don't think that adding tap water to the wort should be an issue.

On the efficiency, yes, I think your numbers are correct.

 

[axlrose16]

people add tap water to their beer right before they pitch yeast all the time (not me but a lot do). RDWHAHB

 

[PhlyanPan]

RDWHAHB

I would, but I'm out for another couple of weeks until my last batch finishes conditioning.

I'm not real worried about it, but when it happened there was definitely a moment or two of panic thinking that I'd ruined 4 hours of hard work.

 

[COLObrewer]

Happened to me once (with clamps) then I made another chiller that has the tubing bent at the top and reaches out appx. 1' past the side of the pot, also flared the ends so the hoses would stay on better, they still leak, it's hard to stop because of all the expension/contraction due to temp changes.

 

[PhlyanPan]

Happened to me once (with clamps) then I made another chiller that has the tubing bent at the top and reaches out appx. 1' past the side of the pot, ...

That's a good idea. I think I may try to modify mine to do that. Maybe even sweat a threaded fitting on it so the connection is more solid.