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10/28/21 - HLT on at 9am with 10 galllons of water, 5.2 gallons in the mash tun. We'll heat HLT to 135 degrees so that we can get mash to the appropriate level. Just finished crushing grains and adding water salts. Going to mash in at 10:15am with my crushed grains and mash water at 133. Found a leak in HERMS, fixed that. Mashed in at 10:30am, mash probe showed 129, but in the mash after stirring, we were at about 126. The mash was at about 133 before I added grains, so I lost about 7 degrees with my 23# grain bill. Resting at 125 or so right now, I'll turn HERMS back on if the temp gets too low. Next steps is to heat the HLT water up for the next step. Heating HLT water to 185 to get it hot enough to add back to the mash tun to get to the next step of the mash. I am running the wort pump during initial mash in because I want to keep the temperature very consistent. I have the valve just barely open. Adding approximately ~4.7 gallons of 185 degree water to mash tun, the goal is to get the temp to 152. Added 5 gallons of 185 degree water to mash tun and stirred. Timer starts at 11:05am. Temp is spot on at about 153. I am still circulating through HLT, but HLT temp is turned off. I'll monitor this to keep the temperature at 152. I have the value on the wort pump about half open. We currently have 12 gallons on the mash with water and wort. We'll sparge with 4 more during the next step. During mash out, my water was only about 170, not hot enough for a full mash out at 168. I drained the water to the boil kettle pretty quick and I'm going to try to rise the mash to 160 or so hopefully will all my sparge water. I'll mix up, let rest for 10 minutes, and slowly move the rest of the wort to the boil kettle. I didn't get a great mash out, but we'll move on. Pre boil gravity of the wort at about 70 degrees was 1.050, we're hoping to improve this a bit with the boil. Boil is going well, just about to add the last hop addition and then we'll have 5 minutes of boil left. My steam condenser leaks steam a little, but we keep the boil at 34% power to staying rolling. Ended up only pitching 2 packets of yeast on to 9 gallons of wort, I must have lost more to pumps and lines than I originally thought. I pitched at 70 degrees at 2:50pm on 10/28 and added the airlock with sanitizer. Overall a pretty good brew day. Also ended up getting a post boil gravity of 1.060, which is really good, pretty spot on. After pitching 2 packs of dry yeast over the top of wort, I had airlock activity in about 6 hours, going strong 24 hours later.