Second Batch - Smoother

The second time is so much better. We went with the same recipe increased the water and changed our brewing process a little. Some things we will continue, but we still haven't entirely figured the best way to utilize all of our equipment.

Things that went better this time:

• We used the correct amount of water and ended up with 5 gallons when finished
• We pitched the yeast into the wort and shook the carboy to aerate, this gave us a fermentation time of 12 hours instead of 36
• We only worried about sanitation post boil. This saved a lot of time.
• Whirlpooling the wort before draining into the chiller. We were left with a perfect cone. Thanks Adam.
  
• We replaced some of our dirtier tubing. Everything looks cleaner

Things that still need work:

• The sparging process is still challenging us. We are hitting our mash temps and we didn't have any flow problems this time, but we had a lot of particles flowing into our boiling pot. We have a few theories: 1st, we started sparging almost immediately after recirculating the first couple cups of mash. Do we need to let our grains compact before starting the sparging process to form a filter on the false bottom? If we wait, since our mash is flowing out faster than sparge water is coming in, we have to keep opening and closing the drain to keep the mash from bubbling as the cooler empties. Last time we let the cooler totally empty of liquid before we stared sparging and we didn't have a problem with grain flowing into the boiling kettle. 2nd, we used gravity instead of our pump to get the mash into the boiling kettle. Last time, we drained the mash into a bucket which has a hole near the bottom that we have a tube connected to with a pump sending the mash out of our the the bucket and up to the boiling kettle (sitting above the mash ton). This let any grain that was drained out settle to the bottom of the bucket before it was pumped up to the kettle. We thought that just using gravity could save a step and prevent an opportunity for oxygen to get into the mash before the boil. We still aren't sure what to do next time...
• Carbonating a keg... we tried to force carbonate our first batch, it didn't work. We chilled the beer, then racked the beer into the keg from the carboy and pressurized the keg to 25 psi. Then we "shook the fuck out of it" let it sit for 5 hours, shook it again then poured. It was still flat. We are going to wait 3 days and see if we have beer.