Stein Beer

Interesting piece on the making of Stein Beer.

The making of a Stein Beer | My Beer Pix

Last weekend Tonya Cornett, brewmaster at Bend Brewing, flew down here to San Diego to do a collaborative brew with Tomme at Port / The Lost Abbey.
Both Tonya and Tomme are last year’s World Beer Cup champion brewers (Tonya for the small brewpub category, Tomme for the small brewery category), so the beer they brewed would no doubt be good.
Turns out they decided to make a Stein Beer, which is an old German method that involves placing super-hot rocks into the wort. (”Stein” is German for “Stone.”)

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Hey pardon my ignorance, but what exactly is the main purpose behind the design of a Stein. (Hey that rhymes )

Brew Your Own: The How-To Homebrew Beer Magazine - Beer Styles - Hot Rocks! Making a Stein Beer

: Stein beer is all about a brewing method, not about a style. Any beer can be a stein beer, as long as you use rocks in the brewing process!

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zoebisch01 said:

Hey pardon my ignorance, but what exactly is the main purpose behind the design of a Stein. (Hey that rhymes )

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To make the drinker look awesome.......

Traditional steins are made of ceramic (stone) and were used because glass was really expensive and not available. Northern Germany was very wealthy for a while because of its ceramics that were in wide demand before porcelain and glass came on the scene.

The designs were literally just to make them look good.

I've been wanting to find more info on this since christmas when I listened to all the CraftBrewer Radio Aussie podcasts...they did three or four stein beers over the years, and discussed them in some detail...but no recipes.

They keep mentioning though, having seen a video Michael Jackson covering the brewing of one...I had no luck finding it, since there's that "other" Michael Jackson that totally overwhelms any searching...

If anyone has it or has heard of it, it would be great to see it...

Thanks OllllO for starting this thread...I was actually thinking a couple days back of posting asking if anyone's ever actually brewed one.

Stein means stone.
A beer stein is for serving beer.
A stein beer is using stones to make beer.
Beer stone is a residue build-up when making beer.

Confused?

ETA:
Stone Beer is made my Stone Brewing in CA.

I thought I had heard that this technique was also used in making some Scottish beers? The super-hot stones not only boiled the wort, but you'd get some of the caramelization that gives some of those particular sweet notes in a Scottish ale.

the_bird said:

I thought I had heard that this technique was also used in making some Scottish beers? The super-hot stones not only boiled the wort, but you'd get some of the caramelization that gives some of those particular sweet notes in a Scottish ale.

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Yeah that's what the aussies talked about, they tried different types of material, not just regular stones, but some ceramics, and fireplace bricks, and dried different methodls like lowering the stones slowly and letting wort sit on the top of the stones, all to get different levels of carmalization.

Evidently according to them, the stones are usually added to the primary during fermentation as well, supposedly to enhance the effect.