1st brew tomorrow, am I making a terrible mistake?

[TheMumbler]

I'm planning my first AG brew tomorrow as my false bottom mash tun is now at the point where i need to test it in use (mash/sparge bag on hand in case it sticks, thanks to Chris-x1 for that piece of advice), and I'm itching to try this No doubt I'll make a ton of mistakes but I'm hoping to head one or two off at the pass. Any advice and/or answers to the questions below would be greatly appreciated.

I am planning to use the recipe below to make a weissbier

23l brew length
90 min mash and 90 min boil. Batch Sparging.

3kg Wheat Malt
2kg Lager Malt

60 mins Mount Hood (aa 4.3%) 20g
15 mins Mount Hood (aa 4.3% 10g
15 mins Irish Moss

Yeast is a White Labs WLP351 Bavarian Weissen starter courtesy of lancsSteve who split the orignal batch to make his dunkel weissen. I put a starter on Friday night using 50g of wheat spraymalt in 500ml of water which seems OK. A packet of Safbrew WB-06 is on stand by.

water treatment
2g Calcium Sulphate
3g Calcium Chloride
1g magnesium sulphate

Questions
1 Liquor
Water additions were calculated assuming values given here to lancsSteve by Graham in this thread as we share the same water supply and composition has changed little according to United Utilities. The actual values I got from Graham's calculator based upon a 29.4l pre-boil volume are:

1.58g Calcium Sulphate (53.69 mg/l)
2.69g Calcium Chloride (91.44 mg/l)
0.36g magnesium sulphate (12.17 mg/l)
0.5g calcium chloride as chalk (17.17 mg/l)

I don't have any precipitated chalk and can't weigh less than 1g anywhere near reliably since I am using kitchen scales (to be honest I'm probably looking at 2g plus or minus a bit). Is my approximation basically OK or is there something I should worry about? Also I'm fairly sure that I read that Calcium Carbonate is best put in the mash tun, do these additions go in the mash or the HLT?

2 Mash Ratio
Most people seem to use a 2.5:1 liquor to grist ratio here but I notice that lagers are often brewed with a thinner mash (up to 5:1 ratio according to Home Brewing) so should I be thinking about a thinner mash?

3 Hopping
qbrew predicts a bitterness of 12 (EBU I assume) which is within it's suggested range for a weissbier, however GW's recipe for a german helles weissen in Graham Wheeler's Home Brewing is rather more hoppy at 30 EBU so maybe I should be going for more hops?

4 General
Am I missing something really important or making some kind of stupid error I've totally missed?

Cheers

[floydmeddler]

Sounds like you've got it all under control man. You've taking into consideration loads more stuff than me when I did my first AG anyway! I didn't even think about water conditioning.

From what I can see in other online recipes, bitterness is around 20EBU tops.

Get the brew on and give your equipment its first proper run. You're going to have a cracking day making beer!

POST PHOTOS!

[floydmeddler]

Check this out:

http://www.wyeastlab.com/rw_styledetails.cfm?ID=170

[TheMumbler]

Thanks for the reassurance and the link floydmeddler

The HLT is heating the first round of water! I'll post something in brewdays when I'm done.

[floydmeddler]

Enjoy dude!!!!!!!!!

[delta9]

Good luck with the brew man!

[TheMumbler]

Cheers. The grain is mashing now but I have a nasty feeling my false bottom was floating around when I was stirring the grain in I have a mash and sparge bag ready but I guess I will lose some temperature if I have to pour out through that plus end up rather more turbid runnings than is ideal. Oh well this one is all about learning about the equipment.

[floydmeddler]

Well... ? ?

[TheMumbler]

Well the false bottom didn't work and I had a stuck mash. Mash/sparge bag to the rescue! That added a bit of time in the sparge so I guess it may have caused problems, also not sure how turbid the wort will end up as a result. On the plus side I had plenty of mashed liquor, have established a rolling boil and added the first lot of hops (22g mt hood 4.0%aa). Smells good anyway

[floydmeddler]

Good man. Reckon you did great and will have a fantastic beer!

[adm]

On the downside:

A wheat beer is always a good candidate for a stuck mash anyway......it helps to add some oat husks or rice hulls to the grain bill to prevent this. Wheat is just "sticky", which is one reason why the Germans do complex decoction mashes. Although it's a pretty simple beer style, it's potentially a tough one to do as a first AG. There's no shame in a stuck sparge with 60% wheat.

On the upside:

A wheat beer is meant to be cloudy anyway, so you don't really need to worry about any debris getting carried through the brew. Don't worry for a second about wort turbidity!

If you've got enough wort out, at a decent gravity, then you're in great shape!

[TheMumbler]

21 litres, OG 1050 at 21 degrees centigrade which makes 1051 I believe. Recipe from qbrew was aiming for 23l at 1051)

Not all the wort got boiled (boiler too small) and I think I could have had a bit more wort actually but the hop strainer had fallen off in the boil so it only drained to the top of the tap so I think I was pretty damn close to the recipe prediction. I was really lucky there as a couple of hop flowers had found their way into the tap during the boil forming a filter but not quite blocking it. Very slow draining as a result but I left a load of proteins and other muck in the boiler and the wort looked pretty clear. Beginners luck I guess!

Wort I took the OG from