First day with the Grainfather all grain brewing system. A couple of problems.

I used my Grainfather for the first time today. Here is a step by step walkthrough.

I am trying the Timothy Taylor Landlord clone from Beerworks. The kit uses Maris Otter rather than the Golden Promise used by TT. The hopping schedule also looks quite different to other clones I have looked up.

I put the water in the boiler (17.8 litres for 5.3kg of grain). The thermostat said 17C and it took over half an hour to get up to mash temperature of 67C (but I forgot to put the lid on which would have speeded things up).

I mashed for 1 hour and the wort looked really clear. I had heated 14.4 litres of sparge water to 77C and mashed out for 10 minutes at that temperature.

This is where I think problems began because the sparge was really fast as though the grains were quite loose. The wort was quite cloudy at this point just before the boil and had sediment floating around in it. The gravity reading at this point was 1.043.

I also could not get the boil temperature past 99C. Although the wort was clearly boiling nicely the thermostat never read HH which indicates a boil. I just proceeded anyway.

I boiled for an hour putting the hop additions in muslim bags.

I then attached the wort chiller which brought the temperature down to 22C pretty quickly and then I syphoned the wort into the fermenter.

The wort was still quite cloudy though and I only ended up with 19 litres in the fermenter instead of the target of 23 litres. The wort is quite pale - much paler that TT Landlord, but we will see how it tastes eventually.

Not sure what I did wrong or even if it is that critical. Hopefully the beer will clear in the fermenter at some point. The OG was 1.050 which should give an ABV of 5.2% if the FG comes down to 1.010 as suggested in the recipe.

I have found out that the temperature issue is probably due to the temperature probe not being fully inserted into the base of the unit. So I will try and fix that for next time.