After screwing around with the pumbing issues I get to mashing. After doing three 30 minute decoctions I am starting to feel good about what is going on. I do batch sparging and use my pump to recirculate for 20 minutes before running off the batches into my cooper. With that much grain the my trusty mash/lauder tun I got very slow runoff (and there was no room to stir in rice hulls due to all the grain). I bet it took me better than two hours to get my preboil volume, and oh yeah, I was watching football at the same time and the Cowboys were playing awful. After finally getting the wort into my boiler things went better. I was slightly under my preboil gravity target so I boiled 1/2 hour longer to concentrate the wort. Actually, this migh end up working in my favor as the long boil will help carmelize the wort just a little more. After that, using my trusty counterflow chiller pumping icewater with my pond pump I finally got my cooled wort into the fermenter. The good news is that my original gravity turned out to be 1.085 which is only a point less than my target and I also ended up with the volume I was looking for so it's all good.
I really hope that I can get a pretty clean fermentation, when you have a starting gravity this high, it is really easy to stress the yeast which start producing all kinds of fruty esters (and God forbit fussels which would really be bad). I pitched a gigantic yeast cake of Wyeast 2006 from my last project a Munich Dunkel (3rd generation) so hopefully, I can get decent attenuation and avoid the nasty off flavors. From beginning to end, it was an 11 hour brew day, I started at 8:00AM and got finished at around 7:00PM. I sure hope the beer comes out well otherwise I suspect I will be just a little upset. Besides hitting my gravity, I didn't blaspheme excessively so I guess I would have to conclude it was a sucessful day.
