Woah for efficiency

So, I finished a brew-day on the new system today. The day was much longer than anticipated due to a few issues that cropped up:

1) My march-pump stopped working. This meant I had to revert to manual labor for shifting liquid around. Gravity feed is fast, it's true. But it can get heavy.

2) It was 30 degrees, ambient temperature - with a pretty good wind. This meant my heating took WAAYY long.

3) I measured out the recipe in 2lbs increments.

So, on to the good news. I hit 85% efficiency. Yeah, you're reading that correctly. 85%. I can probably get in the 90s if I tweak the system a bit more, but 85% is AWESOME. NOTE: that's 85% mash+sparge efficiency. I don't know what the boil-off efficiency is. The cooling tonight was provided by my trusty IC, since without both pumps I couldn't use my sweet new heat exchanger. That will have to wait for another brew-day.

10 gallons of American Pale Ale fermenting strong, though. That's all that counts. I used all Amarillo. Only 4.5 ounces for 10 gallons, and it's 8.2% Alpha Acids, so, by my estimate, we're looking at 44 IBUs. Roughly, it's a Harpoon level bitter. The really crazy part? 1.090 on-the-dot OG. Safale-05 gives 75% fermentation efficiency, giving an estimated FG of (I think) 1.023, and final alcohol content of 8.9% ABV. Not too shabby!

We'll see in a week how it goes. In the meantime, I've left the brewery a mess. I have 28lbs of grain to cleanup, and 3 large pots to scrub, which I'll need to do asap. Off to bed though - gotta make sure I get my beauty sleep.