Nut Up or Shut Up Brown Ale

I started brewing my next batch last night.  Ingredients are as follows:

• 3.3 # liquid unhopped amber extract
• 1.5 # amber DME
• 1.0 # corn sugar
• 0.5 # crystal malt
• 0.5 # black patent malt
• 0.5 # chocolate malt
• 1.0 oz Cascade leaf hops, boiling
• 1.0 oz Warrior pellet hops, boiling
• 1.0 oz Saaz pellet hops, boiling
• harvest spices (nutmeg, cinnamon, mace)
• White Labs London Ale Yeast WLP013

I started the boil with cold water and the grains (crystal, black pat, and chocolate) floating around.  I set out my liquid yeast to warm up to room temp like the instructions and the brewdude at MOKHB instructed.  I will admit to some concern about using liquid yeast for the first time.  Close to boiling, I began to remove the grains.  It did take a long time because my wire strainer is small, and my larger strainer is silicone and not really ideal--holes are too big.  I finally got most all the grains out.  Man, this wort is darker than I expected.  Sparging, mainly due to the less than ideal strainers was slow and tricky.  Kat was again, a huge help.  I think there ended up being quite a bit of grain and hop pellet sludge. I'll rack it to a secondary so that it's not in contact with the wort for too long.  I capped the carboy and put it outside to cool.  Since it was after midnight I set the timer for three hours and took a nap.  At about 2 or 3am (depending on how you want to look at it since it was daylight savings time to set clocks back) which was about three hours setting outdoors, the temperature still read pretty warm (too warm to register) but it felt like it was cool to the touch.  Since body temp is 98.6 and it reads up to 70 degrees, I am assuming it was around 80 degrees.

Spent grains

hops boiling

   

I set the carboy in the kitchen and uncapped it.  I shook the White Labs liquid yeast one more time and poured it into the carboy.  Some got on the inside neck, so I capped it again and agitated it a little to make sure the yeast got down into the wort.  It did not look like a whole lot of yeast.  At about 9am I got up and checked on the beer.  Had this been dry yeast it probably would have been foaming all over the place.  It appeared dead to me.  At about 1pm, there are slow bubbles (one every 10 minutes?) so I believe either the yeast is starting to do it's job, or it's contaminated.

Nut Up or Shut Up Brown Ale