WOW...what a day! Exciting, stressful, really fun today all in all. After the boil started my first beer helped me relax a bit
Some notes below, if anything sticks out kindly chime in. THANK YOU to everyone who was quick to respond today, I couldn't have done it without you.
-Mash temp was within one degree at strike. After an hour it only dropped 2 degrees.
-Vorlauf initially took about 5-6 quarts. It was clear rather quickly, just not sure about those little white buggers.
-My pre-boil wort goal was 6.5 gallons. I ended up getting 2.75 first runnings, added to 6.5 after sparging. FWIW, the mash tun has just over 7 gallons worth of liquid in it in all. Perhaps something was off. I only ended up with ~4.75 in the fermenter. I think I either boiled off more than a gallon or maybe I misunderstood what was meant by mash tun dead space.
**Mental note to either use my shiny new Blichmann as BOTH the HLT and the boil kettle or get a new kettle. Using a boil kettle with no measurements takes WAY too long to get measurements.
-Used my SS immersion chiller after much internal debate with the following results...
-5 minutes, 126 degrees
-10 minutes, 109
-15 minutes, 97
-20 minutes, 88
-25 minutes, 80
-30 minutes, 80 (at this point, I pulled it out. Although tap water temp. was at 66, I figured it wasn't dropping any lower)
**Side note, I used a shi$ ton of water to do this. Figured out that I was using 5 gallons every minute and a half. That equates to 100 gallons of water to chill my beer. Not sure if this is better than other means of chilling.)
Finally, I was really stoked to find out that my post-boil gravity was 1.057, the recipe states 1.056!
Again, thank you so much. Oh yeah, I tasted the wort after I checked the gravity and that was certainly the best tasting wort I've ever had. Miles above any extract I've sampled. Looking forward to my next brew!