River Rat Rye summary

Brewday went pretty well. I hit my temperatures pretty much right on, 147-150 for the mash, and sparged about 165. Efficiency may have been a bit low (it sucked actually), the wort weighed in at I think about 1.032, I forgot to write it down apparently. That thickened up to 1.046 in the boil, so I could get 4.5% abv or so. PH was still a bit of a problem, it was high all around. I tried correcting the sparge, this time measuring quarter teaspoons into a pint of water and adding one cup of that at a time. I added 3/4 of a teaspoon and it was still high. I had been told on some forums that I probably just shouldn't get too worried about ph, so I just went ahead and sparged, but now I'm wondering if ph has something to do with my lack of efficiency.

I did have one "incident" where I accidentally pushed the rubber stopper that holds the steel mesh and copper pipe into my mash tun. I had about 1 gallon of 120 degree water and 1/2lb of rice hulls in there, so besides making a wet mess, there wasn't too much loss and it wasn't even sticky. I turned the mas tun so the drain side was away from me and all was fine.

This time, I went with my conceptual "compacted" brewday, where I waited to do things like get the mash tun clean until after I started heating my strike water, or waiting to make my sanitizer and sanitize my fermenter until the last 10 minutes of boil, etc. While this got me from start to yeast pitching in 4 hours, this was not such a good idea. I set up closer to the sink this time, which was handy, but it prevented me from being able to clean things as easily, and at some times I was somewhat rushed, and I couldn't watch my boil well enough, which resulted in a boilover. Next time it'll be back to having everything clean before I start, if not necessarily sanitized.

I started about 12:30, after picking up 10 gallons (again, actually the Absopure gallon + 8oz jugs) of water, and exchanging my propane tank. The mash got underway about 1:30, and I was on the burner at 2:50, boiling by 3:02, and had hot break at 3:05. I pulled it from the burner at 4:10 and pitched my yeast 20 minutes later. All in all everything worked great.

My biggest problem today were the hops and the volume. The whole leaf hops are a bit troublesome to deal with as they soak up a lot of wort (which exacerbated the volume issue) and are hard to keep out of the fermenter, unless you rack your wort into the fermenter, and I really prefer to pour mine, I think it's much easier. I don't think I took enough of my sparge water, but that's kind of a catch 22 because my gravity might have been even lower if I had taken more. I'm going to skip dry-hops on this batch because I don't want to lose any more beer to absorption.

I need to find out what to do about my efficiency. I know batch sparges are not efficient, but they should be more efficient than what I'm getting. I might need to start showing up at the Red Ledge Brewer's club meetings and ask for some input. There's tons of resources online, but I think I want to talk to some people who have experience in person. Perhaps I'll ask the person with the strongest beer