Beautiful Day to Brew!

My thoughts and prayers are with everyone in the mid-west who have been effected by the tornado's. I lost my house to fire and I know how it feels to have to pick up the pieces, things will get better with time.

With that said, we were fortunate this weekend in the North East to have an albeit breezy, but sunny day in Upstate New York. Sunday I took advantage of the weather and brewed the crowd favorite Mulligan Wit.

Here some some items of note from the brew day:

• I made a starter that I cooked a little hot and it boiled over in the stove.
  It's also had some of the DME scorched the bottom of the flask (first time using
  my flask, kind of a pain in the arss).
• Started brewing at 8:30am, finish time 2:30pm, 6hr brew session.
• I heated the mash water up to 175F and it leveled out at about 154F when it was in the mash tun. One item of note was that I got two different readings from the
  thermometer, I usually stick it into a tiny hole I have in the top of the mash
  tun, and it was saying 160F, when I put the thermometer into the mash, it was
  154F. I am assuming that this is because the steam is so hot in the mash tun.
  Take note for future batches.
• The gravity of the mash was 1.060 without any adjustments to compensate for heat. I need to make sure that I start cooling these off more from now on.
• I sparged at 175F and had two rests in the sparge. By the time I was done with the sparge I had used 5.5 gallons of sparge water and 4.5 gallons of mash water.
• The beginning boil OG of the wort was 1.040, this was again without adjustment to temp.
• I used a fine grain bag as a way to keep hop loss to a minimum. I also used this for all of the other items on the list for this recipe.
• The boil went for about 1hr and 20 min., the end yield was 4.8 gallons.
• The OG was 1.059, a whole .010 over my target at 1.049 so I added water
  and stirred it a while. I got it down to 1.052 and called it good.
• I pitched at 74F and it was bubbling within 24hrs very actively!

It was a successful brew day. I doubt I will enter this one into any competitions as it's more of a brew that I enjoy than anything. I just hope that I am going to be able to get it close to what I had last year.

Cheers!