How To Brew A Stein Beer

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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.

basket.jpg
 
I have done a few hangis, and this is my prefered approach to heating the rocks. Build a lattice stack of firewood, in this case about 20 pieces of jarrah 4x2 demolition timber picked up off street verges. Intersperse the rocks in the upper couple of layers, so they cop the heat from all the wood below. Allow about 2 hours from starting the fire to have the pile collapse into embers with glowing red rocks in between.

heating.jpg
 
Get the rocks out of the fire using a long handled shovel. Put in stein basket and shake around to get all the ash off. Put the basket in the beer! We did this slowly on the first one and we were both wearing boots, long non synthetic trousers and shirts, welders gloves, face shields. Didnt really need all that but better safe than sorry. There is a good chance of a boilover if you just plunge the rocks to the bottom.

The first basket boiled at the rocks, but we had 89 degrees at the kettle edge. We figured the rocks had done their thing and changed them. This was wrong, we actually put the same cooled rocks back in later and they caused a boil immediately. You need to remember that it will take a while for the heat in the rocks to get into the wort. Leave the first basket in for 10 to 15 minutes to get the whole kettle to a boil. After that new rocks will give an immediate vigorous boil that will last a good 5 or 10 minutes.

hotrocksbasket.jpg
 
Graham Sanders suggests hovering rocks at the surface, so all the heat in the rock exits through a small area in the wort, maximizing caramelization. This did work better, but even more effective is to appoint a "Carameister". The carameister takes a glowing red rock in some bbq tongs, dips it in the wort, lifts it out, watches the wort boiling on the rock until it dries out, plunges it back in and repeats. If he holds it out too long the sugars carbonize and smell a bit acrid. If he is a skilled carameister, be builds up layer after layer of caramel on the rock, and these are the rocks to be put in the fermenter. If you can find a rock with a depression on the surface, so you can lift it out with a little pool of boiling wort on it, all the better.

carameister.jpg
 
You need a sterilized pot for the carameisters rocks, put a lid on, cool, add rocks to fermenter.

I get about 8 l/hr evap on a NASA gas burner. I set the recipe for 4 l/hr thinking the boil wouldn't be vigorous. We lost 10 l during an hour boil using rocks. We went from 30 l at 1.040 to 20 l at 1.058. The loss of sugar to the rocks seems minimal. Expect reasonably high evap losses. Especially since the blood lust tends to overtake logical proceedings, and the hottest rocks get chucked in in bulk just to see what will happen.

After being removed, the rocks are still hot enough to burn a glove if you accidentally put one on them.

burningglove.jpg
 
A 2 hr fire generates a lot of coals. Why not use them to cook lunch? Here we have a beercan chicken sitting on a can of Boddingtons just getting underway, the beer can turkey under the large pot has been going for a couple of hours sitting on a coffee can of chocolate porter.

beercanchicken.jpg
 
After watching the birth of the Stein beer on Saturday, I couldnt stop myself sitting down and doing some sums to see if we can get some control here. I have guessed a bit and ignored things like heat losses, but here goes anyway. Im sure there are some younger and more appropriately educated brains out there that can tidy things up.

To raise 30kg wort from 60C to 100C (40C) we need 30000 x 40 = 1200000 calorie.
To evaporate 5kg water from this we need 5000 x 540c/gm = 2700000 cal.
Total 4000000 cal.

Now here come some assumptions.
1. A rock is 150mm diameter.
2. Only the outer 20mm is useful.
3. The specific gravity is 2.7 and the specific heat is 0.2.
4. Cherry red is 750C ( it is for steel)

Calculating the volume of a 150mm sphere and subtracting the vol of a 110mm sphere we end up with
1070ml x 2.7 = say 3kg. of useful rock.

Heat available = (Specific heat) x (mass) x (drop in temperature)
= 0.2 x 3000 x (750 100)
= 390000 cal
SO THE ANSWER IS 4000/390 = TEN ROCKS

(So what else does one do on a cold wet Monday morning!)
 
Cheers for that GL, im going to have to give it a try one day.

What style(s) did you brew this way and have you tasted them yet?
 

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