My wife had mentioned about making a beer to the baptism. So I asked her what type she wanted, she replied an Amber. We were going to have a large party at my parents house so it seemed a good time to display my brew. One thing I did learn from the Dark Brown was doing an all grain didn't seem any more work than the partial mash. So I decided to add the extra difficulty of doing an all-grain, on a beer that I was brewing for family and friends. Given this was the first time I was using the mash tun on my own I knew it wasn't the best idea and potentially presenting a lower quality beer, but I went for it anyway.
I got the hot liquor tank water up to infusion temp and starting pouring it into the mash tun. I made the mistake of slowing pouring the water in as I kept moving the grains to make sure they did not clump. When I got to my expected 2 gallon in the mash tun, temperature was only 145-150. I wanted 155, so I started warming the water up quickly and poured more in. After a 1/2 gallon more water, I had it up to the right temperature.
After about a 1/2hr of mashing, I got my sparge ready. This is where I had my second mistake, I forgot the hot liquor tank had cooled and I needed to add more. I had quickly heated it up which delayed sparging by 20 minutes. When the water was ready I remembered about prepping the grain bed, I poured a few pints back into the top of the mash tun to get the grain bed filtering clean. I poured a lot more back in than I probably needed to, thinking I wanted the wort clear instead of just free of husks and large particles. Concerned about the tun getting too cool, I started to sparge. I remembered my friend warning against over sparging and pulling out tannins, so I had that on my mind too. After the sparge was complete I wasn't sure if I left too much sugar in the mash tun as the spent grains tasted a bit sweet. Too many concerns. After the boil and cooling I took my OG and found it was 1.062, which was a 1 above the expected, I switched back to being concerned about tannins. I needed to remember the rule of "relax, drink a home-brew".
When fermentation was done the final gravity was 3 lower than expected. So I figured I did good. After talking to my friend, the mistakes I made and concerns I had were minor. Longer time or more water in the mash tun are not big problems and only have a marginal effect. Later I learned more about mash temperature and I suspect the lower temperature extracted more fermentable sugars.
The moment of truth came and the beer was good. I served this one and the Dark Brown and the Amber was consumed more. | 
