Tomorrow brewing 10 gal of Traquair House Ale clone (wee heavy), using locally grown and malted base malt - Palouse Pint English Pale Malt. It is my 20th anniversary of home brewing.
Congratulations on 20 yrs! Traquair House Ale is a great choice for the celebration.
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Thanks. Weather allowed for me to brew it yesterday - too windy on Saturday. While I was adding sparge water to my mash/lauter tun, I got distracted by a slight boilover of the separately boiled mash runnings (to make the syrup) I had on too high flame. I know better but was moving as fast as possible, to hopefully be done by 6:30 pm due to another scheduled activity. Anyway, having gotten distracted, I forgot to add the water treatment salts (gypsum, calcium chloride, canning salt) to my sparge, and ended up adding them instead to the kettle pre-boil - mostly to hit my calcium #. Otherwise things went pretty darn well, and from the 17.25 gallons of collected runoff, I boiled it down to 11.5 gallons of wort, so almost 6 gallons boiled off including 2.25 gallons of first runnings boiled down to +1 quart of nice and thick syrup (of course re-added to the kettle). It was also a learning experience as I had targeted ~76% efficiency to hit ~1.082 OG and ended up with 84% efficiency and 1.089 OG. It should have enough nutrients, o2 and yeast to ferment well. The 2 hot scotchies tasted great.