This was one of those days where everything seemed to go wrong. To start things off, I realized the brew kettle, with all its nooks and crannys, needed a thorough cleaning, so I gave it a good soak in oxi-clean during the mash. Unfortunately it took forever to scrub it out, so I had to extend the mash a bit.
After more than a two hour mash (including mash out), I was finally able to run off. Unfortunately I lost a piece of the manifold stirring in the sparge water (batch sparge), so the whole thing got clogged with grain bits. I ended up pouring the whole thing into a sparge kettle with a BIAB bag and just squeezing the bag for the lauter.
It was somewhere around this time that I also remembered I forgot to add the oats. Oops. Whatever, let's just throw the hops in and be done with all this. Oh, wait this recipe calls for an extra 30 min boil before the 60 min hop addition. I guess it's just one of those days.
I also hooked up the counterflow chiller (part of the long cleaning process mentioned above) for the first time since going all-grain. I hadn't been confident in my ability to keep it clean, so without being able to inspect it, I decided it was best just not to touch it. Well this time I ran hot oxi-clean through, then a rinse and several gallons of Star San to sanitize. Once clean, it was certainly a huge timesaver, as I could cut out the hour spent waiting for the immersion chiller to work, instead running off straight through the chiller and into the fermenters. This may be the only reason I survived this brewday.
Fermentation:
No 02, yeast pitched directly from smack packs, Chico from December and Denny from August, pitched at 54F, temp set to 66F.
5 Days: temp set to 70F.
3 Weeks: Racked to kegs. Tastes pretty good, but the SG finished lower than I expected (1.010 and 1.007), so there's more alcohol than expected.
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