First all grain, lessons learned

[waldoar15]

Well, that was an experience.

I brewed a 5.25 gallon batch of cream of 3 crops.

6lbs pale 2 row
2lbs flaked maize
1lb flaked rice

I read the whole one million pages on that in the recipe forum and I gathered the mash would be a sticky mess and added some rice hulls.

Beersmith said to use 11.25 quarts of strike water. No problem.

I may have made a mistake here, but decided to do a 1 gallon mash out. Ended up with a stuck/slow mash.

I figure this was my fault as I made a manifold from PVC and just cut slots in it with my porta-band saw. I had my doubts about the width of the slots from the get go. It took quite a while to mash out and I only ended up with 2.5 gallons of first runnings.

I put on some rubber gloves and yanked the manifold, drilled a bunch of 3/16" holes, re-installed it, added more rice hulls then sparged with 4.25 gallons.

The sparge ran very well after that. Boiled down and hit the OG.

I think I'm going to put some pipe in the mill tomorrow and slot it a little wider instead of using a band saw.

Going to do an AG Fat Tire clone Sunday.

 

[GrizlyGarou]

The band saw blade probably was too thin. Seems like you solved the problem by drilling the holes, though.

Did you have the slits on the top half of the manifold pipe, or the bottom half? If they're pointed up, they're more likely to get clogged up.

 

[electric_beer]

I really recommend this manifold: http://www.homebrew.com/articles/article09130301.shtml

The trick is to cut the slots at an angle. I've had a lot of luck with it. Stuck sparges suck, but hey, it sounds like you still made beer! Congrats on the first AG!