Please critique this recipe and newbie brew plan

[surista]

I'm a total newbie brewer; only two batches under my belt. One was a new brewer kit, other was extract & hops. I prefer lagers, so am sticking to what I like to drink. Was recommended to pick up some speciality grains to help round out the flavor profile, picked up some crushed pilsner malt not realizing it was a base grain So now I have 1Kg of pilsner malt lying around and I know next to nothing about mashing etcc.

Anyway - after lots of reading and research, I'm going to be brewing two 1-gallon batches (want to test out two different kinds of yeast) in a few hours - so you beermeisters out there have a few hours to save this n00b from any major TEH STUPID. Based on my reading (and thanks to DeathBrewer at Homebrewtalk for his great partial mash writeup), here's my warplan:

1) 2.5L of water, heat to 75 C.
2) Add 1Kg of crushed pilsner malt. Keep at 65-67 C for 60 mn
3) In meantime, bring 3 L of water to 80 C in separate pot for sparge; sanitize the crap out of 1-gallon carboys, funnels etc. Crack open a home brew (only six remaining from second batch!)
4) After 60 mn, pull up grains to drain; tea-bag in sparge water for 10mn
5) Add original wort to sparge water pot = should be about 5L. Bring to boil.
6) Start of 60-minute boil: add 600g of light DME and 10g of Northern Brewer leaf hops
7) After 30 minutes, add 5g of Hallertau leaf hops and 5g of Northern Brewer
With 5 minutes left, add 5g of Saaz hops
9) End of boil; cool with ice bath in sink to 20 C
10) Take OG reading; according to BeerToolsPro, target OG is 1.050
11) This should end up with about 4L of wort. Pour 2L each into two 1-gallon glass carboys,top both to 4L with approx. 2L each.
12) Add Saflager W-34/70 yeast to one carboy, S-23 to the other
13) Airlock, store in corner of dark corner of pantry
13) Crack open another home brew and chill.


OK - someone please let me know the (most likely) numerous errors in my ways.....

TIA!

[adm]

Step 11 looks a bit wierd to me - if you have 4L of 1050 wort, put 2L into each carboy and then add 2L more water to each, you'll end up with two carboys, each with 4L of 1025 wort.......which is incredibly weak.

Why not put the whole 4L of 1050 wort into a single carboy? Or just brew more in the first place?

That one kilo of malt will yield approx 1 gallon of 1050ish wort only. If you want more, then you need to scale the whole thing up!

[surista]

Actually - my bad for not being clear. Still learning how to use BeerToolsPro. But if I put in for a 6.5L boil to end up with about 4 L of final wort (after evaporation etc), with the 1Kg of crushed malt and 600g of DME, the final 4L of wort has an OG of 1.093. So that should be my target OG when I take the first reading, not 1.050. If I then adjust the final wort volume by adding about 4L of water, the OG adjusts to 1.049 - that's my OG target for each 1 gallon carboy.

At least, I think I have it right. Or am I missing something?

[adm]

That makes sense now - I missed the DME addition in your write up as well....

[surista]

So I made this recipe last night, pretty much as my instructions above.

1) Get all ingredients out and ready to measure etc. before hand:


2) Partial mash of 1kg of pilsner malt. I didn't have any binder clips, but rubber bands worked pretty well.


3) Keep the mash tempature around 65-67 C


4) After the mash, add everything to the sparge water, bring to boil...


5) ....start adding your hops


The boil was a bit odd in that there was no clear 'hot break' - lots of foaming up etc., but no hot break.

Even more interesting (worrying?) was that I ended up with only about 1.5L of wort - when I had expected to end up with around 4 L! Needless to say my wort was thick and syrupy. I couldn't even take a hydrometer reading. I finally just added split the wort into the two separate carboys, and added water to each to top up to about 3.5L each, added the yeast - and then took a hydrometer reading, which came out to 1.050 on the nose:

[harry_mac]

You're on the slippery AG slope now - there's no going back and before you know it you'll be brewing 10 gallons at a time

[Mitchamitri]

Well said, I went from 5 to 10 gallons in 9 months.....