Batch 134, 11-11-11 repeat

What a fucked up brew day. Ugh. This was supposed to be a repeat of the fabulous 11-11-11 End of the World beer, but I'll have to see how this one comes out. Like last time, this is a partigyle batch, so 5 gallons of End of the World, and 5 gallons of a smaller beer that I'm calling "Muddy Waters".

10 gallon partigyle batch

22 lbs 2-row
8 lbs wheat
1 lb crystal 120
0.5 lb crystal 60
0.75 lb chocolate malt

Mash at 152F for 60 minutes with 11 gallons of water. I'd forgotten that this maxes out my mash tun, and actually overflowed it a bit. Completely full! What I didn't know at the time was that the elbow from the valve to the false bottom fell out. When I tried to vorlauf, all I got was lots of grain and it never cleared, so I pumped it through a strainer into a bucket. I sure as hell hope hot side oxidation is a myth. Fortunately, my pump was up to the task and had no problem pumping wort and grain at the same time.

The small batch was the same, I went ahead and added 7 gallons back to the MT and pumped through a strainer into buckets, then dumped the buckets back into the kettle for boiling. What a mess. I used all my buckets for this and that. I had 6 (six!) five gallon buckets in play during the mash out.

I'm pretty sure what happened is I pump hot water from the HLT into the MT through the bottom and that blew the elbow out of the inside of the valve. Since I was using 2 boil kettles, I quickly retrofit them to use my older SS braids. Those are tried and true, and the false bottoms don't seem to work very well. As it turns out, they did a great job for keeping the hops in the kettle, but I still had a lot of wort left behind since the fucking elbow leak where they connect to the valves. I seem to have spent a lot of money on an "upgrade" that doesn't work very well.

End of the World hops:
6 oz Chinook at 60 minutes. That is all.

Specs:
OG: 1.110, actual 1.090, which I'm assuming is from the screwing around with the mash.
IBU: 111 -- yeah, maybe.

Muddy Water Hops:
1 oz Galena, 60 minutes
1 oz Perle, 30 minutes
1 oz Calypso, 5 minutes

Specs:
OG: 1.055, actual 1.045, and that's probably a bit generous.

I used Wyeast 1272, American Ale II in both. They are bubbling away nicely at the moment, so I'm sure there will be beer. Maybe not quite the awesomeness of End of the World, though.

Update 14 Jan 2014, put this on tap on my nitro spout. Initial taste test is pretty darn good, actually.