My first attempt to do a partial mash recipe - Oatmeal Stout.
Here is 1 lb of flaked oats sitting in about 5 quarts of water. My grain bill was 4 lbs and I was told to use 1.2 quarts of water/lb, so 4.8 quarts.
Here is the mash after I added the remaining 3 lbs of grain. I was to heat this to 150 and hold at that temp for 60 minutes.
Above you see my high-tech, heat-loss-prevention system. It seemed to work all right. I would check it every 10-15 min. The temp would drop to 140-145. I would heat it up for a minute until it was 150, stirring it well, and then take it off the burner and wrap it up.
During the last 15 minutes of mashing, I heated 1 gallon of sparge water to 170. In this picture you can see how I basically wrapped my strainer in my grain bag and set that on my bottling bucket. The strainer was just big enough to hold the 4 lbs of grain. Then I slowly poured the sparge water through the grains, rinsing any possible remaining sugars. This process took about 10 minutes. I'm told you don't want to rush it.
A close-up of the spent and sparged grains. Thank you barley gods. ;)
After the mash and sparge, I cleaned out the brew kettle and poured into it the collected wort that was in the bottling bucket. I added the malt extract (much less than a typical extract-only batch), brought to a boil, and proceeded as usual. My original gravity ended up being a little over the target, which must mean my mash worked.
A somewhat unrelated picture of what I drank during this brew night, the real Anchor Steam (left) alongside a few glasses of my clone (right).