American Pale Ale

So it's back to brewing classic styles for the first beer through my new mash tun. I've dispensed with the bag for now and I'm close to finishing the 3 vessel system I've been building for the last few months.

Progress

The recipe is one I've done several times before, though I've played with the hops a little. The brewday itself was besieged with issues from the off:

1. I connected my heat exchanger backwards during the initial mash, and the wort ended up hitting 69C through the HEX for a short time before I spotted the error and dropped it back to 66C.
2. I ran my sparge water through the HEX to ensure it was at the correct temperature, but once again I connected it backwards and may possibly have heated some sparge water way above an acceptable temperature, also the water in the HEX boiled for a moment which is not good.
3. I didn't heat enough sparge water and ended up topping up the kettle with around 3.5L of water to hit the pre-boil volume. 
4. My hop filter using a stainless braid got completely clogged with pellet hops and I left around 5L of wort in the kettle at the end of the brewday.
5. Efficiency was poor,  around 63%, a combination of mill gap and running out of sparge water.
6. The final insult - I messed up setting the temperature on the fermenting fridge and 12 hours after pitching the yeast it was sitting at 12.5C.

I'm still hopeful it's not a complete disaster, but I'll be lucky to pull some decent beer from this brewday, and in any event I'll be very short on volume.

One nice result from the whole experience was the clarity of the wort at the end. It's unlike anything I've seen before from any other brew setup I've used. Hopefully it translates into clearer beer, though I'm not so sure about that.

 Anyhow, that's the first and hopefully the most painful brew on the new system. You can plan these systems out all you like but you don't really get an idea how it all works together until you fire it up. I now know where I need to concentrate my efforts to get this running smoothly. I need to:

1. Sort out draining of the kettle to the plate chiller. Some ideas below
2. I need to heat more sparge water than seems necessary, better to have too much rather than too little. I was still getting 1.024 from the last runnings out of the mash tun so missed out on a lot of sugar here.
3. I need to tune the mill gap a little. I had no issues with sparging so there seems to be some room for adjustment.
4. I need rules about HEX connections. It matters which way it's connected.
5. I need to mount the controller properly. At the moment it's just sitting on the edge of the stand.

For the kettle draining, I'm going to have to abandon the sparge braid as a hop filter. It just isn't up to the job and it's also having a dramatic effect on my ability to create a whirlpool in the kettle. Because I'm effectively draining the kettle from the whole of the outer rim, the whirlpool has no chance to gain any momentum.

My plan is to replace the braid with a simple side facing pickup tube and simply depend on an effective whirlpool stage to concentrate hop debris away from the pickup tube. I'll need to throttle back the outlet to avoid upsetting the resulting cone of hop debris. Also this means I can't really use the boiling wort towards the end of the boil to sanitise my chiller, so the chiller will have to be sanitised separately. Maybe I'll figure out a clever way to do this, but I can't think of one right now.

Here's the recipe:

5.1Kg Barrett Burston Ale Malt
0.34Kg Weyermann Munich I
0.34Kg Joe White Wheat
0.23Kg Breiss Victory

Water treatment: 2.5tsp CaSO4, 1tsp CaCl2, 1tsp MgSO4, 0.25tsp lactic acid

18g Magnum 14.7% @60
20g Cascade 7.9% @ 10
20g Centennial 9% @10
20g Cascade 7.9% @ 0
20g Centennial 9% @0

Pitched 200ml slurry of WLP001. Fridge set to 19C (or so I thought, dipped to 12.5C but quickly corrected back to 19)