Saison Du Mont #2

Crafted this beer to be one of four beers available on tap at a friend's wedding. The first iteration was to find a good recipe, second one to hopefully improve upon it.

Taken and slightly modified from http://wiki.homebrewersassociation.org/SaisonDuMont-AllGrain
First iteration, including brewing notes and photos here: http://www.brewprint.com/recipe/saison du mont

Brew day: 2012.06.12

Mash:
Tried dough-in for the first time. Hit 20 quarts water to 110 F, mixed in grain thoroughly (temp was negligibly lowered to 109.8 F) and let rest for 20 minutes to increase efficiency. (Described by John Palmer here: http://www.howtobrew.com/section3/chapter14-3.html)
Took grain bag out (stored in extra fermentation bucket) and heated water (15 quarts) to 156.0 F
Put grain bag in and stirred thoroughly, temperature lowered to 141 F. Added heat to bring to 156.0 F. Immediately turned off flame, sat brew pot on a towel on the floor and wrapped two blankets around and over it.
Let rest for 60 minutes, over which time the temperature dropped to 153 F.
Sparged with my black pot about 3/4 full of 170 F water twice. My process here was to put the grain bag in an empty fermenter bucket and pour the water into it. I then stirred the grain around for one minute, although there wasn't enough water to fully submerge it. I then lifted the bag and let it drain for 20-30 seconds, and poured the wort into my boiling pot which was being heated to a boil. Repeated the sparge once more with the same process, then set the grain bag on a false bottom to collect the last of the drippings.
Mash resulted in about 24 quarts of 1058 wort.

I've never seen cold break like this before so I must have done something right when I chilled the wort. Normally I use cold tap water until the wort is down to 100 or so, then use the ice to finish it off because the ice is more effective as the temperature differential between tap water and wort lessens. Instead, this time I used the ice earlier because I read that DMS will continue to get produced until 155 degrees, so the goal was to cross that threshold as quickly as possible. In future batches, I'll probably buy a bag of ice so I can use ice for the entire chill. I did get plenty of cold break (shown in some photos below.) Unfortunately, I've never dealt with this much cold break before and didn't realize there are some simple techniques for leaving it behind when transferring it to the fermenter. The yeast might be coated in proteins, which isn't desirable. In the future I'll make sure to do a better job siphoning and leaving as much protein behind as I can.

2012.06.13 - Dialed temperature controller up 1 degree to 75 F
2012.06.15 - Dialed temperature controller up 1 degree to 76 F
2012.06.26 - Chilled refrigerator to 46 F to promote clarity
2012.06.27 - Racked to keg leaving all the yeast and sediment behind. At this point I took a gravity reading and discovered fermentation stopped at 1030 -- eeep! Letting partially fermented beer warm back up to room temp over the weekend and then I guess I'll repitch some yeast and try to restart fermentation. I wish I had taken the gravity reading before doing the transfer but now I know to do that in the future.
2012.06.28 - learned that refractometers are innacurate when reading a solution containing alcohol (or anything other than just water and sugar). After measuring with hydrometer, the beer finished at 1010! Started chilling to 45 F while carbonating.