I wanted to get a quick brew in today, so went for an extract + steeping grains (really a mini-mash, despite what the recipe says) clone from BYO a few years back, specifically the Nutcracker ale. Hope it turns out good. However, with the intention of "speeding things up" I made a bunch of bone-headed blunders. Read and enjoy... and don't make the same mistakes!
Started the water boiling in the kettle while the steeping grains were finishing up inside. Which would have been fine, if I hadn't gone ahead and added the DME to it once it hit boiling. Or if I had calculated how much extra water I needed. I didn't leave space for sparge water from the steeping grains... which were sticky with gooey, tasty, malt sugars. In the end, I had about 8.5 gallons of wort pre-boil, which I managed to get down to 6.75 gal at the end of an hour. I usually put 5.5 to 6.0 gallons in my fermentor, so I wasn't too off, but yikes. Hopefully the lowered OG won't throw off the beer too much. And I must not have let the whirpool go for long enough, because my fermentor ended up with LOTS of hot/cold break in it, despite a short whirlpool.
Oh well, based on past experiences, it should come out fine in the end.