Water treated and on to heat up. Kids in bed and wife out babysitting - all quiet around the house. Estimated finish time about 11:00, and we're away:
Boiler and mash tun ready, even fitted the new slimmer outflow so it siphoned:
Grain already weighed up the previous evening!
Bit on the warm side:
After the addition of a bit of cold it came down to temp so grain in (action shot coming up!):
All going well through the mash, little drop off of temperature - squeezed in a few more litres for the first batch sparge and opened the tap to drain. It's at this point that the wheels came off the evening - stuck mash
Tried blowing (bit hot
) bubbles emerged in the tun but no sign of outflow. To cut a long story short the evening descended into a bailing, straining nightmare - the aftermath of which is below:
Eventually got the boil on, finish time bang on midnight. Couldn't be bother to try out the new cooler, so dropped it straight into the FV to cool down overnight.
Achieved 15 litres (just!) at about 1052.
So nearly hit the OG I was after of 1058, actually helped by my incompetence in terms of using the batch sparge calculator. After the event I sat to work through my losses and realised I'd only heated enough water for the pre-boil volume
- so the 5 litres short is basically the grain and the tun deadspace, which was virtually zero once I'd finished 
.It's in the FV, unfortunately with a pile of hops that escaped the strainer, bubbling away nicely
I did manage to get AG#1 (Old Peculier) bottled during the boil but it wasn't quite the relaxing brew I was after.
David
