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Big Dog Brewing
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To hopefully make the information more accessible to anyone searching AHB in future, I will put some observations and photos of our stein beer brew day here in a separate thread. Other than the BYO article on stein beers, and Graham Sanders podcast, there isnt much info around on how to go about it. This is what we learnt from our first one, which will make it much easier if we do it again next year.
First up you need rocks, a stein basket, and firewood. Our stein basket is stainless steel mesh from a scrap metal place, tied together with copper wire.
Rocks should be either a very hard metasediment like greywacke, or igneous like basalt etc. We tried a pegmatite/coarse granite which crumbled in the heat and was no good, granodiorite which cracked a little but worked well, and some house bricks which held together best in the fire but may or may not be food grade in the beer.
The bricks in this picture were heated as we thought the rocks might not be enough, but in fact the 20 kg of rocks would be heaps to boil 30 l for 60 mins. The stein basket is 230 mm diameter, if you put 3 or 4 rocks a bit larger than a fist in it each time, you would probably change rocks about 4 times to get from sparge temp to boil and then boil 60 mins, assuming you get the rocks glowing red.
First up you need rocks, a stein basket, and firewood. Our stein basket is stainless steel mesh from a scrap metal place, tied together with copper wire.
Rocks should be either a very hard metasediment like greywacke, or igneous like basalt etc. We tried a pegmatite/coarse granite which crumbled in the heat and was no good, granodiorite which cracked a little but worked well, and some house bricks which held together best in the fire but may or may not be food grade in the beer.
The bricks in this picture were heated as we thought the rocks might not be enough, but in fact the 20 kg of rocks would be heaps to boil 30 l for 60 mins. The stein basket is 230 mm diameter, if you put 3 or 4 rocks a bit larger than a fist in it each time, you would probably change rocks about 4 times to get from sparge temp to boil and then boil 60 mins, assuming you get the rocks glowing red.