How bad did I mess up?

Mashing
1

Hopefully everyone can calm me down a bit and tell me I’m over reacting and everything will be fine :slight_smile:

Brewed a 5gallon batch of oatmeal stout this weekend. Pretty much after the decision to brew I proceeded to make mistakes along the way.

  • started at 8PM on Friday night (~20F degrees)…never doing that again
  • drained water into mash tun and started pouring in grains and mixing the grains
  • realized I didn’t close the valve on the HLT and by the time i finished mixing the grains was up to 12 gal in my HLT when I should have only had 4
  • decided not to waste anything an let the mash rest
  • since I didn’t have more than a gallon in my HLT, I had to get about 8 gallons into the HLT and up to ~170F so that the HERMS coil was covered so that I could recirculate mash
  • due to the cold and time to get the HLT water up to temp, my mash dropped ~140F degrees after an hour.
  • got mash up to ~160F degrees to mash out…so probably a 90min mash
  • drained all the wort into the boil kettle, ended up with about 12 gallons for only a 5 gallon batch
  • decided it was too late and I screwed up too much already so I left the wort in the boil kettle and went to bed
  • boiled wort the following day probably about 120mins to get it down to about 7gallons before adding in the hops
  • with about 15 mins left, added in yeast nutrient and whilfloc tablet and went to turn on the pump to recirculate and sterilize all my tubing/plate chiller
  • pump wont turn on…frozen due to water left in it from previous night
  • decided to dump the hot wort into a better bottle and let it chill outside since it was ~20F
  • near boiling wort and better bottle = melted better bottle
  • grabbed bucket fermentor (luckily this one didn’t melt) and drained boil kettle
  • let fermentor sit outside (lid on with airlock) for about 4hrs until i got it down to ~70F and pitched yeast
  • as I type this right now I hear the sweet sounds of fermentation happening.

So…aside the fact that I’m and idiot, should my batch be OK?

2

If it’s fermenting you’ll have something , sounds like it will be a session beer though. What was the OG ?

3

I don’t think it will be a stout though. Your mash temp was to low for a stout, think it will be a low gravity brown ale. Just guessing .

4

I’d be worried about the melted plastic…

5

Honestly…I’m more concerned about your frozen pump than whether you get beer from that disaster…

Sounds like a few beers may have been involved prior to the decision to brew…

6

as for OG…another mistake as I didn’t take a reading.

frozen pump was from the night of brewing. I used the pump to recirculate from mash turn through herms coil. i always flush it out with water from the HLT to make sure all the wort is out of the coil and pumps…pump just froze because i left clean water in it overnight.

so it sounds like i’ll have some sort of fermented beverage when its all said and done but no guarentee’s if it will be good or not.

my lesson learned from this whole experience is not brew below freezing :slight_smile: Messes up the equipment and the mind