Begin Brewing!

I've heard quite a lot about this beer over the last couple of years, so I decided to try brewing a batch with the best recipe I could locate, adjusted for my Grainfather and a three gallon batch.  This will be the first Imperial Stout I think I have ever brewed.  I don't know where I found this recipe, and I tried to locate it again on the web with no success.  My apologies to whoever originally published it, but since I've significantly altered it below (adding DME, swapping out the flavor/aroma hops, and the yeast) that may be just as well if the beer doesn't turn out. Ingredients 5 pounds 5 ounces Maris Otter malt 3.3 pounds (1 large can) Maris Otter LME 8 ounces English Medium Crystal malt 6 ounces English Pale Chocolate malt 2 ounces English Black Patent malt 2 ounces English Roasted Barley 1/8 tsp. Brewtan B (mash) 1.5 tsp. pH 5.2 stabilizer (mash, after grain) 10 ounces cane sugar (start of boil) 4 ounces Lyles Treacle (10 min.) 1 tsp. yeast nutrient (15 min.) 1

Thanks to the mold infection, I had to toss Irish Red 6.0 before I even got to taste it.  Since it was mostly a mash optimization experiment, it was less painful to toss it out than it might have been.  Today, I decided to brew a sixth version of the beer, as a further test of mash optimization. Ingredients 6 pounds, 6 ounces Maris Otter malt 6 ounces Caramel/Crystal 120L 6 ounces British Medium Crystal 5 ounces Chocolate Rye Malt 0.57 ounces Whitbread Golding Variety hops @ 7.1% AA 1/4 tsp. Brewtan B during boil (20 min.) 1/2 tsp. Yeast Nutrient (15 min.) 1/2 tsp. Irish Moss (15 min.) 3 gallons RO mash water 1.75 gallons RO sparge water 1 gram Calcium Chloride 0.5 grams Canning Salt 1.1 grams Epsom Salt 2.5 grams Gypsum 0.5 grams Magnesium Chloride 1 package Wyeast English Ale III yeast Brewfather estimates the batch will have the following characteristics: BJCP Category: Irish Red Ale Batch Size: 3.0 gallons, 2.7 gallons actual Original Gravity: 1.058 SG estimated, 1.060 SG actual

I've heard a lot of people rave about The Alchemist Brewing's Heady Topper DIPA, but I've never had the opportunity to actually try the beer.  In cases like this, I tend to default to locating the actual recipe or a generally-recognized good clone recipe and brewing that.  I've had to adjust this recipe because I didn't have as much Amarillo hops as I thought I did - and went for Mandarina Bavaria as a substitute.  Otherwise this is the recipe I found. Ingredients 7.25 pounds 2-row Brewer's Malt 12 ounces cane sugar (added during boil, 60 min.) 9 ounces Briess White Wheat Malt 6 ounces Baird's Carastan Malt 4-6 ounces of Rice Hulls (3-4 large handfuls) 3 gallons RO mash water, treated with 7.6 grams Gypsum, 2.2g Epsom Salt, 0.9g Calcium Chloride, 0.8g Magnesium Chloride, 0.2g Baking Soda, 0.2g  Canning Salt 1.9 gallons RO sparge water, untreated 0.6 ounces Magnum hops @ 12% AA (60 min.) 1 ounce Amarillo hops (5 min.) 1 ounce Apollo hops (5 min.) i ounce Cent

I've had a number of frustrations in my homebrewing activities since around 2018.  One of these has been that since switching back to the brewing setup I used then, my brewhouse efficiency is considerably lower than it was before then.  After attending HomeBrewCon 2020 (virtually, of course), I learned quite a bit about mashing that I didn't know before.  I'm hoping that learning will pay off with some efficiency improvements in upcoming batches. For this recipe, I'm testing two variables - grain crush and sparge-to-mash water ratio.  I've switched out my three-roller mill (which is hard to gap) for a two-roller mill and gapped it to match the recommended "thin as a credit card" gap. For this batch, I'm attempting to reach as close to a 1:1 mash-to-sparge water ratio (and going back to heating the sparge water as well).  If the brewhouse efficiency gets closer to my goal for this batch, I'll know I'm on the right track.  If not, back to my note