Had an interesting brewday, I followed the recipe in Graham Wheeler's book. The expected specific gravity reading differed from that of BeerSmith but this may be down to differences in efficiency, I didn't have enough time to investigate.
I added 83g of Torrified Wheat, used caster sugar and not granulated and went for S-04 yeast.
Sadly I didn't have time to build my new hop filter to go with my shiny new pump and this was a big problem.
The new pump did a fantastic job at recirculating the mash and from a bit of trial and error I found that on 7.5V with the tap half open the flow was enough that it didn't stir up the grain bed and the wort became clearer. I would love to see what this is like with a false bottom, I expect totally transparent.
I calculated for batch sparge that I needed to use 1 of 21L and 1 of 14L to give me 30L of pre-boil. Not sure of the final amount into the boiler as I used the pump to transfer from mash tun to the boiler.
After 90 minutes of boiling on the new Foker gas ring I cooled with a 60L ice bin and a drill pump. The drill started to smoke so I switched to a hose pipe feed. I must get a decent pump for this, I hate using all that water to cool the wort.
I started to recirculate with the new pump and with 65g of hops in the boiler I was hoping for a great hop filter bed but sadly it was all a bit too much for the little pump. This is why I need a new filter that will use a very large piece of grade 60 mesh, the hops will have a larger surface area to spread over rather than 9cm of 15mm pipe with 30 holes drilled in. I had the pipe output strapped to the chiller in pipe so it cooled down a lot quicker, not quite the whirlpool effect I have seen but on those lines. I will build a new pipe for that job later.
I had a couple of litres left in the boiler but no way of getting it out so I cut my losses.
I did get 20L into the fermenter which was topped up with cold water to 23L. This was vigourously mixxed and then checked and the gravity was 1.042 at 26.7C so add 0.017 temperature correction, it brings it to 1.059. GW's book has it down as 1.045 and BeerSmith estimated it as 1.056. So overall slightly higher. Despite losing some to trub in the boiler I think I did very well!
One thing that I seriously recommend now is the drill and paint stirrer, best eBay purchase this year!
The yeast is doing well and it is all tucked up in the shed under an insulation sheet to keep the extra heat off it.