A Follow Up on Efficiency

Following up on my last post, some new kegs arrived yesterday, so I spent my evening doing some housecleaning, including kegging up my Oktoberfest.  Welp, in addition to the nearly 2 gallons of wort I had left in the kettle, I ended up with nearly a gallon after topping up the keg! In summary, watered a recipe aiming to make 5 gallons of beer down to nearly 8. Based on the gravity measurements, the beer I made is approximately 3.5% abv, so I'm calling it a Sessionfest. Although it tastes amazing, I would have preferred to make the beer I was aiming for.

May be time to put the old girl out to pasture.

I'm a little concerned about the finishing gravity of 1.012. I would have been happy at that FG if I'd hit my original gravity, but that seems high in such a small beer.  I'm pleased to have it on one level, because the beer is not watery. But I'd like to make sure I'm doing my part to give the yeast a fermentable wort, as I generally prefer a dry finish.

This leads me to another thread in my investigation into efficiency, with is temperature control during the mash.  I've been using the thermometer on my kettle, which I long ago melted during a vigorous boil. It's also cracked and dented and has a very short probe, so I'm thinking I'll retire it, and stick with a handheld instant read (which I'll need if/when I switch back to a cooler MLT anyway. I'd love to have one of those fancy, $100 thermapens, but that's awfully hard to justify in a world where I can pick up a pretty decent instant-read thermometer for $10. After reading this review, I picked up a Lavatools Javelin for around $25. I like the idea of something that has 90% of the functionality at 25% of the cost. In any event, it's a lot nicer than the $5 meat thermometer that I used to use, which worked perfectly well excepting that it would literally fall apart if you held it too tightly.

UPDATE 9/25/2018: There's nothing wrong with either thermometer. Despite being melted and cracked, the kettle thermometer gave me the same temps as my new Javelin (to the extent you can read it through the scorched, crazed, and bubble-filled melted plastic lens).  Given how hard it is to read the kettle thermometer, I ended up using the handheld more often.