In the aftermath of Saturday’s brew session, I managed to get everything cleaned up yesterday afternoon. I managed to realize a couple things during this time. First and foremost I did end up with an efficiency I wasn’t all together happy with (60%, I was expecting closer to 75 or so).
I was thinking that maybe I really do need to jump to decoctions soon. And then I realized that I did have quite a bit extra sparge water. So, during the cleaning on my mash tun I drained out the excess. I ended up with close to a gallon of free wort (stuff that I would have gotten still if I had continued draining the mash tun during the sparge). When I checked the gravity of this stuff, I found it to have an OG of 1.030 (I could have made a mini beer).
The biggest lesson I learned from this, when learning a new technique don’t try to do too much at once. The sparge method I used was not my normal method and it cost me the precious sugars needed to hit my marks.
My next brew day I will be doing this again. I am thinking that I will use the same grain bill but change around the yeast and the hops. I will most likely use the same infusion schedule. Once I get the technique down I will start tweaking it more to see the changes that come about from different schedules.
