Homebrew: Ommegod (I screwed up again) Belgian Ale

Last weekend I brewed with the help of Greg. The recipe that we were to make was a clone of Ommegang. This was also the first time that I tried to do a partial mash brewing. Things went rather smoothly especially since I ordered the wrong ingredients.The name of the beer was dubbed even before the brewing had started. When I ordered the ingredients from Northern Brewer I misread the recipe and thought it called for 0.5 lbs of pale Belgian malt instead of 5 lbs. I was able to recover from this snafu surprisingly well. I had 2 lbs of American Pale Malt left over from another batch, and I ordered extra DME so I was able to put together a recipe that was rather close to the original.This was my first attempt to do a partial mash. That means that instead getting all of my fermentables from Malt Extract, I’m going to get a portion of my fermentables from mashing the pale malt. This method is an intermediate step to what is known as all grain brewing, where you get all of you fermentables from the malt. This method gives you more control over certain aspects of your beer, and it’s slightly cheaper as well. The reason that I’m not currently doing full grain mashes is that I don’t have all of the equipment yet.Since I don’t have an official mash tun yet I came up with one hell of a jury rigged mash tun. I took my bottling bucket and insulated it with two blankets. Instead if making a false bottom. I bought some cheese cloth from the fabric store and made a large grain bag that would sit in the bottling bucket. I need to work on a better way to sparge, I opened the spigot on the bucket and tried pouring the sparge water on the grains but it was far from an ideal sparge. I ironically I got a better than expected efficiency with this sloppy setup.Another thing that I messed up again was that I forgot to make a yeast starter. A starter is where you make a little bit of wort and pitch the yeast into it so the yeast multiplies so you are pitching a larger volume of yeast into the main batch when the time comes. This allows you to make sure that you yeast is alive before brew day, and the larger volume means that fermentation will start faster allowing less time for bacteria to do their dirty work.Other than that the brewing process went fairly smoothly. Greg and I drank some homebrew and played trivial pursuit while the wort boiled on autopilot. Here are the details of the recipe exported from Pro Mash