Mocha Porter: Disappointing Brewday

Today's brewday was a new version of my mocha porter recipe. Unfortunately, nothing really went very smoothly. For one thing the sparge got stuck. It's the second time it's happened but I'm pretty sure I know why. It's probably the flaked oats causing it to stick, but for some reason the last time I used this quantity of oats nothing went wrong. Well, lesson learned. I'll always use rice hulls in a batch like this from now on.

The next problem was that the grain extraction efficiency was awful. The final gravity came to about 1.065, when it should have been closer to 1.075. I'm going to take a look at the spacing in my grain mill, I have a suspicion that I'm not cracking the grains as much as I should be. This makes two batches in a row that have been lower than expected in efficiency. I'm thinking that because I haven't added the chocolate or coffee, I may just leave this as a standard porter and try brewing the recipe the right way in another week or two. Not sure yet.