Porter Disorder

Today my first brewing project went off despite several hitches. I started off with a recipe for a Black Butte Porter clone gleaned from a magazine at my local homebrew store, Homebrew Heaven. The guy there suggested a slight modification to make the beer darker, and based on the final color of the wort I think it was a good call. The final product tasted sweet and well-balanced before I put it into the fermenter, so I'm cautiously optimistic that it will turn out drinkable.

My first problem presented itself about halfway through steeping the grains. I noticed that there was a fair amount of grain floating around in the wort, which I initially attributed to the fact that I was sort of pushing on the bag with the stirring spoon when I stirred. However, when I pulled out the bag to sparge the remaining grain, Emily (who was my gracious brewing assistant today) noticed a gaping hole in the bottom. So, some jostling around and a large mess later, the bag and most of the grain were out of the kettle; I attempted to sparge some of it through a strainer but because I was distracted I used cold water rather than hot, thus reducing the potential sugars I could get from the malt.

My next problem was that I did not have enough water in the initial boil, so that by the time the hour boil was complete I only had about 12 quarts of wort left. To bring the total amount up to five gallons, I added two more gallons of water at about room temperature. This may have been too much, in light of how low the original gravity measurement ended up being (1.030). The cooler water may also have brought the total temperature down too low for the yeast to get a good start; the wort was about 75° when I put it in the fermenter, so I can't imagine the final temperature was much below about 68-70 (though I failed to take the temperature at this point).

So, in the end we'll see. My guess is that I will end up with a relatively low alcohol porter with a nice color and flavor. I recognize this is a best-case scenario, but I have hope.

The Recipe:
10 lb. 2-row pale malt
9 oz. chocolate malt
10 oz. crystal malt (60 °L)
8 oz. roasted barley*

4 AAU (9.1g @ 12.5% AA) Galena hops @ 60 min
4.25 AAU (19.9g @ 6% AA) Cascade hops @ 30 min
4.5 AAU (23.3g @ 5.5% AA) Tettnanger hops @ 5 min

Wyeast 1318 - London Ale III

I also used an Irish moss tablet at 15 minutes.

Lessons learned:
1. I bought 2 2.5 gal jugs of spring water so as to avoid municipal chlorine, fluoride, etc., but I really ought to have bought 3 as a safeguard. That third jug would be great for sparging.
2. Our current kitchen scale is a baker's scale and only resolves to 5-gram increments. This meant my hops measurements were not as accurate as I would have hoped.
3. The nylon bag method of steeping the grain doesn't seem to work for me. I need to either do a false-bottom bucket method or maybe use a double-boiler; I will have to think about this one.

* This was the change to the original recipe recommended by the beer store guy.