Irish Red Head

With two beers on deck that both use the WYeast 1084 Irish Ale, an Irish Draught Ale and an Oatmeal Stout, I thought it would be a good time to do back-to-back brews so I can reuse the yeast. Common sense would say do the ale first, then the stout, so that's what I did. Brew session went pretty well, although the mash temps were up and down. First I was a bit low on the mash-in (only a few degrees), so I thought I'd run it a bit through the RIMS to bring it up. Overshot the mash temp by about 7 degrees, so I used a little cold water to bring it down. Then, due to my inattentiveness, the HLT and mash temps both dropped, so at the end of the 60 minute mash I was about 15 degrees low. Took about 20 minutes to bring the mash up to the 170 degree mash out. After the first runnings went into the boil, I batch sparged twice and stopped the runnings at 1.010. After all of this, I ended up with 5 gallons in the fermenter and an OG of 1.052, about 3 points above recipe OG. Odd thing is my efficiency ended up at 107%, which seems counterintuitive, but the mash points are theoretical, so I guess it is possible to be over 100%.

I have discovered a few flaws in my setup, which will require constant tweaking until I'm totally happy with it. Using a grant/hopback helped to prevent negative pressure on the grain bed, which may have contributed to my higher efficiency. In the past, I'd just pumped straight from the lauter tun and had come close to a stuck mash once. Down side is that you can't connect it directly to the lauter tun, because it makes it really hard to clean it if it's connected directly.

My fabulous wife also agreed to the purchase of a 13 cu ft freezer and Johnson Controls A419 external temperature controller for use as a lagering/kegerator cooler. My wife is the best! Pics will be posted soon. Next up: oatmeal stout.