Outdoor brewing - direct sunlight & boil hops

[maltbarley]

Congrats on the centennial!

[brahn]

Part of the extra wort must be due to a low boil-off volume from your boil issues.

I was thinking about this from the other angle that having too much wort may have contributed to it taking so long to reach a boil and not being as vigorous as normal. I guess it depends on the pre-boil volume. I don't usually boil off 2.5 gallons so I assumed the pre-boil volume was high.

[lexuschris]

I am tagging my extra volume to 2 factors:

+ Poor boil = poor evaporation
+ Couldn't find my metal yardstick to measure volumes

Without my metal yardstick (lost in move), I tried to hold a regular yardstick to my mash-paddle, and then eyeball if the liquid depth was close to my eyeball/mark. I just use a spreadsheet to convert vessel diameter to volume via height of liquid. It has been pretty consistent and accurate over the years. But, if I was off by 0.6" .. that would be 1/2 gallon of wort.

BTW, I batch sparge and am still fine-tuning that technique with my brewstand and Beersmith settings. I calculate 1/2 gallon of dead space under the false bottom and under the HLT intake... I think the HLT is not nearly the much, so am usually putting a bit extra in batch #2.

I did brew a new batch this Sunday, and by turning my brewstand 180 degrees, I had no problem getting to a boil. Also, my volume seemed to be better with my newly purchased metal yardstick! Will let you know how it turns out!
--LexusChris