First Step into All Grain Brewing

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Comdor

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For my fifth batch, I decided to make the jump into all-grain. So yesterday, I made a rectangular mash tune following the instructions through the wiki and sure enough, no leaks and water drained nice. I followed a recipe out of "Radical Brewing" for a Chocolate Mint Stout. I used the batch sparge method, but think I went the wrong way of doing so. I used brew365 to calculate the amount of water I should use to strike and mash with. 5 gallons was plugged in because that is how much I was going to throw into the fermenter, but now that I'm reading this, I'm guessing it expected me to boil 5 gallons. So what we did was add the water to the mash tun and slowly pored the grains in while stirring. The water was at 150 and we closed the tun and let it sit for an hour. After doing so, we turned the valve all the way and recycled the wort that had some trub in it which came out clear the second time around as expected. We let this all drain out before we pored the other 5 gallons of water at a temperature of 170 while stirring the grain. I turned the valve all the way and then filled my kettle. It seems that I was left with 2 gallons of wart that wouldn't fit into the kettle. The OG was supposed to be at 1.065 but ended up being 1.050. The other two gallons were left out since it barely had a gravity reading. I have yet to calculate my efficiency, but I thinking it wasn't all to great. I did some researching and found that I shouldn't have opened the valve all the way, but instead, let it drain out slowly. I thought this was only for the fly sparge technique. I'm open to suggestion as to what I should have done or what I can do for the next batch. I look at this as a learning experience :).
 
Comdor:

What part of MD are you at? We're brewing in 2 weeks in Harford County, and we do all grain, you're welcome to stop in and watch how we do it.

Unfortunately I don't have time to diagnose what you did, but if you want to hang out while others do it, feel free to drop in. Link in my sig.
 
doughing in with 150 degree strike water will make your actual mash temp much lower than the desired 150. For a mash temp of 150 you'd want to strike with water in the 168* range...the low mash temp probably caused you to not have full conversion of starches to sugars and thus the low OG.
 
Jester - I wish I could make it but I will be out of the country during that time, but maybe next time around I will take you up on that.
Dedhedjed - We heated the water until the temperature reached 164 which after adding the grain and everything brought it down to 150. A friend of mine did pass me the link to https://www.homebrewtalk.com/f36/maximizing-efficiency-when-batch-sparging-77125/ so I am going to take a further look at this. Maybe should have waited a little longer before moving the water to the tun.
 
After a few days of researching, I think my problem was the temperatures. I hope to try this out again in a few weeks with better results.
 
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