Troubleshooting mashing in and boil

[sherwicf]

Hi all,

Long time lurker here trying to find some answers to questions. Been searching through the forums and online about what went wrong in my first brew!

Firstly I was using this recipe to get me going. Been a fan of Brewdog since I started drinking ale so:
http://www.hoptomology.com/2013/10/11/getting-punkd-brewing-up-a-brew-dog-punk-i-p-a/

For the mashing in, I use a mash/lauter tun with a false bottom(approx 5L of water is what is required to cover the bottom, a small stand + course filter). Looking through Orfy's pictorials I found his 2.6L/kg ratio for mash water and I was using 4.5kg of grain so ~12L of mash water. So question 1 Should I have added in the 5L of dead space at this stage so used 17L of sparge water?

Question 2, I've made my grain bed by re-running the first run ins back in etc..at what point should I stop and place the sparge water in? Depending on Q 1, should this be where I put the 5L of dead space into the equation?

q3) how important is the rolling boil? I've seen a couple of things online that discuss this and some people say it may be ok to not have it? I lost the rolling boil a couple of times during 'the boil' due to my equipment (looks like this: http://l.westfalia.eu/medien/scaled_pix/600/600/000/000/000/000/001/160/52.jpg), how big of an issue will this be?


Thanks, this is an awesome forum!

 

[Pappers_]

q3) how important is the rolling boil? I've seen a couple of things online that discuss this and some people say it may be ok to not have it? I lost the rolling boil a couple of times during 'the boil' due to my equipment (looks like this: http://l.westfalia.eu/medien/scaled_pix/600/600/000/000/000/000/001/160/52.jpg), how big of an issue will this be?

I bring the boil to rolling boil, then back it off to a mild boil - still boiling but not a violent boil. Part of this is to keep the boiloff to about 1.5 gallons for my system.

 

[hawktrio]

Q3 - I went from a slow boil to a vigorous boil using a camping element and have more hot break that also settles quicker post boil, clearer beers and cleaner tasting brews in general.

 

[LLBrewer]

For Q2: you add your sparge water after you've completely drained all of your first runnings. The dead space will already be full and the grain saturated so whatever you put in as sparge water, you should get out as wort.