After a morning's hard work in the brewery I had collected 7 gallons of wort and about 380 gravity units of sugar, just the amount that I wanted. I ran up to my local home brew store to shoot the shit with the guy directing the all grain class--he only comes in for the class and he knows his shit and loves to talk beer. Around noon I was back in the brewery and ready to get the kettle full and boiling.

I don't know what happened. It just slipped. 5 gallons of wort crashed to the ground just as I was getting ready to pour it into my kettle.

That's a bit of an exaggeration. As a matter of fact, there was still about a gallon in the bucket when I grabbed it from the floor.

After cleaning and alleviating the shock, I decided to attempt a recovery. I went back to my local home brew store, grabbed some crystal and victory malts to steep in a little water. I dosed the remainder of the mornings mash with an ounce of goldings. Once the steeping was finsihed, I put the hopped runnings and the extract into the kettle and boiled it, adding half an ounce of simcoe for 60 and an ounce of goldings for one.

What was going to be a yeast experiment has become an FWH experiment. We'll see just what sort of hop flavor this generates, and whether it contributes much bitterness. I calculated the IBUs contributed by the simcoe at only 21. The upper bound of utilization of the goldings is calculated to be 12. If this beer (O.G. 53) balances slightly bitter or neutral, I think that means that I got fairly high utilization of the alpha acids from the FWH. If it balances in the other direction, then the utilization was lower. Of course, given the unorthodox FWH proceedure, I'm not sure how much weight to give this little data point.