Well November flew buy fast! We were able to make two beers before we left for vacation. An all Centennial hopped American Pale Ale, and a Russian Imperial Stout. The lesson from these brews were 1. make a hop sack for the brew kettle, and 2. read Denny's Cheap 'n' Easy Batch Sparge page . I thought I read it, but turns out I missed the part about both runoffs being equal for optimum efficiency. The methods we have been using are designed for a different system and brewing technique, such as fly sparging. So as soon as I got back from vacation I brewed a Kolsch, and it worked out great. Really smooth session! I also was able to control the boil off rate so I wasn't boiling off too much wort, The runoffs were pretty close to equal, and the efficiency turned out to be 76%. Not bad, seeing as the recipe was designed for 70%.
Here are a few shots of my brew partner bottling his R.I.S. Unfortunately we ran off way too much wort into the kettle and diluted our pre-boil gravity. we collected 9 gallons at the start of the boil. we boiled hard for 90 min. and wound up with 6 1/2 gallons at the end. At bottling it tasted very close to the commercial example. It was getting late so we opted not to boil longer to reduce the wort down, instead we accepted the lesson of "watch your runoff amount". 
Here is the recipe for the Imperial Stout, it is based on an Old Rasputin clone.
15 lb Canadian 2-row
12 oz Chocolate malt
8 oz Black Patent
18 oz Crystal 80
8 oz Victory
2.12 oz Cluster at 7%AA (60min)
1/2 oz Centennial (15min)
1/2 oz Northern Brewer (15min)
1 oz Liberty (2min)
3 pks Wyeast 1056
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