Northwest Pale Ale in the Fermenter

So I finally got around to brewing a new batch of beer yesterday. It's been months since my last batch and I've been getting much encouragement to get back in the game. Even our monthly house-cleaner is pushing the issue - his subtle hint was to drop off two half-racks of 32 oz Corona Familiar bottles, a couple of them unopened (bonus!). I had not heard of this variant of Corona before, but apparently it's just the same stuff but in a big, brown bottle....I guess he gets it at a local Hispanic market.

I brewed a Northwest-style Pale Ale modeled roughly after Deschutes Mirror Pond Ale. 6 gallon recipe follows:
10 lb Pale Ale Malt
0.75 lb Crystal 60L Malt
0.3 lb Dextrin malt
2 oz Cascade Hops (0.75 for 90 min, 0.75 for 30 min, 0.25 for 15 min, 0.25 for 5 min)
Wyeast 1335 British Ale II (I wanted 1318 London Ale III but Mountain Home Brew, my nearest home brew store, was out)

Mash efficiency was the best I have achieved to date: 88%! For non brew-heads, this means that I was able to extract 88% of the fermentables (sugars) out of the malted grain. I believe that I can attribute this excellent result to 1) maintaining the mash temp at 153 deg and sparge water at 170 deg - I've undershot my mash and sparge temps the past few batches so I really focused on aiming high and maintaining the temps this time around, and 2) lautering very slooooowly - took me over an hour to capture the needed volume of wort.

I've been having trouble honing in on the evaporation rate of my setup for the boil. For the second consecutive batch it was around 1.25 gal/hr so I'm sticking with that for future recipes.

Regarding the hop schedule, I really have a hard time believing that boiling the small amounts for such short time periods at the end of the boil makes a noticeable difference in the end product's taste but I suppose there's a chance that gifted palates will appreciate it.

The fermentation was slower to take off than past batches; after 12 hours, I was still only seeing a bubble exit the airlock every ten seconds or so. I didn't do a yeast starter this time and went with an unknown-to-me yeast strain but hopefully it will all work out.

This may be Greek to a lot of you so perhaps I will dedicate a future blog to a quick overview of the all-grain home brew process. I've only been at it for a year or so but my results have been very good to date (with the exception of an acrid batch of Amber Ale...still not sure what went wrong there but suspect it was high fermentation temps.) I still have a few procedures to iron out but I'm happy with my setup and equipment.

UPDATE: Fermentation is now going very nicely. Healthy-looking krausen and rapid bubble-age in the airlock...