Well, the brew day went pretty well, but it was long.
Pros
The new false bottom for the kettle worked pretty well, all told. Brewing ten gallons with twelve ounces of hops, including a half-pound of pellets, I got all but a quart of wort out before the pump just couldn’t pull any more out. The underlet space was jammed with pellet particles.
Also, the time I spent the night before thinking about what I was going to be doing paid off in fewer trips up and down the stairs, and more time off my feet. This left me a lot less worn out than on previous days.
Cons
My efficiency was terrible (65%.) I think my crush was not all that great, but even worse is that I suspect that I had dry spots throughout the mash. My tun volume is small compared to the amount of grain I was mashing, and I did a fairly stiff mash to boot. These conspired to make stirring difficult.
My burner is wimpy. It takes too long to get mash water heated, and to get the wort to a boil after the sparge.
Chilling took too long, although part of that was due to low flow rate at first — I wanted to catch some hot water for cleaning.
It took me from around 9:00 AM till 4:00 PM to make this batch of beer. A plate chiller would probably knock half an hour off that, and a higher-output burner would probably knock another half hour off. When I get the bucket heater on a timer, I will be waking up to a Gott cooler full of mash water on brew day, which will probably shorten my brew day by an hour.
