Here we go!

[LostDakota]

First AG today.

Preheat the cooler with hot tap water

Heat mash water to 165 (10:15am)
Dough in @ a little under 150, add .5 gallon boiling water to bring up to 154. Mash ended up being about 3 gallons with 9.75# of grain. Mashed for 1 hour.

Prep sparge water, 5 gallons at 170, during mash.
First runnings:

 

[LostDakota]

Sparge twice using 2 2.5gal
Mistate #1: Forgot to take initial gravity of bre-boiled wort. Had to use two pots. Brought to boil, while kegging 5gal Ed's Apfel w/grape. .

First (and only) hop addition.

Bottle 2.5gal Ed's Apfel w/cran during boil, then sanitize fermenter and equipt.
Condense two pot into one due to evap.

Mistake #2: Tighten all clamps before turning on the water for immersion chiller. DAMMIT got *****ed with water at this step but managed to blindly turn the water off before it became to catastrophic.
Chilled to 80, took OG reading and after calibration turned out to be 1.046. This is where I might need some help figuring out efficiency. (Don't worry I'll ask later after some research.) Pitched shortly after dumping pot into fermenter to aerate. (Lid and airlock on at 2pm)

Conclusion: AG gives you more time to fiddle around with more beer projects, is really not that hard and makes my appartment smell like St. Peter's Nuts (read heavenly.)
Thanks to everyone on this site. Even though you may not have responded to my posts, you have still influenced me in a HUGH way.

 

[Soulive]

Looks good. You're mashing with that cooler-heating water, right?

 

[LostDakota]

Yeah, I think. I heated the hater on the stove. Water was left in my "pails" over night. I read about the evils of hot water tanks.

 

[Soulive]

Yeah, I think. I heated the hater on the stove. Water was left in my "pails" over night. I read about the evils of hot water tanks.

But I'm saying, the water you used to pre-heat the cooler is the water you also mashed with, right? You didn't dump that water out after pre-heating?

 

[LostDakota]

Yeah I did. I kinda though that adding my mash water to the cooler would lower the initial temp, then the addition of the grain would lower it some more. I'm not Math's biggest fan, and I didn't want to figure out the temp that I would have to start with. I just let the water sit in the cooler while the MW was warming up. When it got to about 140, I let her drain.

 

[Soulive]

Yeah I did. I kinda though that adding my mash water to the cooler would lower the initial temp, then the addition of the grain would lower it some more. I'm not Math's biggest fan, and I didn't want to figure out the temp that I would have to start with. I just let the water sit in the cooler while the MW was warming up. When it got to about 140, I let her drain.

In the future, mash with that same water. Put it into the cooler around 180F and let it come down to about 168F, then throw in your grains. You can download Beersmith to do the math for you...

 

[adx]

You used hot tap water to preheat your tun. Soulive is talking about doing hotter strike water for the preheat. For example, if Beersmith tells me I need 168F water to hit a temp of 154F, then I will heat my strike water to 180F and put it in my tun. Then once the temp of the water in the tun drops to 168F I'll dough in. That gives you the 12F delta as a way to preheat your tun.

 

[LostDakota]

adx: noted.

I guess I just didn't want to wait for the drop in temp. Plus, I admit, I've never done this before. I really do appreciate your input. I will try it next time, maybe tomorrow. hehe

 

[Krazy Bazturd]

Nice job finishing your first AG batch in under 4 hours.:rockin:

 

[adx]

adx: noted.

I guess I just didn't want to wait for the drop in temp. Plus, I admit, I've never done this before. I really do appreciate your input. I will try it next time, maybe tomorrow. hehe

It doesn't take that long. Just leave the lid open and stir. It probably takes the same ammount of time to fill it with water from the sink and to drain it as it does for it to drop 10 or 12 degrees with the lid open. The cooler will really suck a lot of the engery out to preheat that much mass of plastic.

Plus you aren't wasting a few gallons of water.