1/2/10 - First brew with my new march pump was hoping it would cut my chilling time down. 

About a week earlier I had prepared a 2.5 gallon - 1.032 starter in a carboy and fermented around 60 F.  A few times per day I would give the carboy a swirl, by Friday it seemed to have finished, so I chilled it to about 40 degrees.

During the mash in I heated the mash water to 180 to 190 (even though my target was 172) and got a little carried away with the pre-heating of the mash tun, I didn't need to use the pump but I tried anyways which cooled the mash water too low.  I ended up mashing in at 150 instead of the 155 target.  I drained off a portion of the mash water to heat back up and then added back to the mash to hit 155. I lost about 4 degrees over the course of the 60 min mash, probably because the tun wasn't very full. 

Draining the tun wasn't terrible although it took probably 20 mins.  I added the sparge water, though I didnt pay attention to the amount I added and undershot the second runnings.  So I had to add a third running to get to the volume.  In the end I was still about .25 gal short of my preboil target of 7 gallons.

Nothing notable about the boil.

15 mins prior to flameout I put the chiller in the kettle and started recurculation through the pump.  Priming the pump while the wort boiled turned out to be a real pain, there was always a big air bubble between the kettle and the pump inlet.  As soon as the burner was turned off the air bubble cleared.

I was able to chill down to 60 degrees in an hour, though most of the chiller coils weren't submerged.  I was hoping to chill into the 40's, pitch and let fermentation ramp up to 50 degrees.

I ended up pitched the yeast at 60 degrees and immediately put the carboy in the chest freezer set at 20 degrees.  Within 4 hours the temp was down to 52 so I don't anticipate any ill effects from pitching higher. 

Had a hard time fermenting down to targeted OG of 1.020 even with rousing the yeast daily for about 2 weeks @ 65F.  Eventually called it good at 1.028 after seeing no movement in 6+ days. Next time I should definately mash lower.

3/9/10 - After a month of lagering I freeze concentrated the beer in a keg.  I turned down my chest freezer temp control as low as it would go (20F) and left it for 48 hours which translated into about 20% of the volume freezing (really rough guess).

I estimated the final ABV at 10.7%.