Der Hochofen Stein bier

[dlovin]

So I had this crazy idea one day to take my buddy's old smoker and turn it into a blast furnace View attachment ImageUploadedByHome Brew1433476198.517347.jpgView attachment ImageUploadedByHome Brew1433476247.016409.jpg
After cutting off the smoker box and using the smoker door to cover the hole in the floor of the smoker , I used a homemade adobe mix of clay, sand and wood ash to essentially concrete a length of gutter into the bottom of the smoker , I drilled 3 rows of 1/4 inch holes an inch an a half apart down the length of the gutter. In blast furnace terms this is referred to as a tuyere . View attachment ImageUploadedByHome Brew1433477888.339711.jpgView attachment ImageUploadedByHome Brew1433477905.723065.jpgI attached the open end of the gutter to an industrial fanView attachment ImageUploadedByHome Brew1433478132.325194.jpg and before I knew it I had an honest to goodness blast furnace that I dubbed Der Hochofen ( blast furnace in German )View attachment ImageUploadedByHome Brew1433476820.233073.jpgView attachment ImageUploadedByHome Brew1433476848.249699.jpgas you can see it worked as planned View attachment ImageUploadedByHome Brew1433477175.292185.jpgwhen it settles down we even cooked some bacon on the rocks View attachment ImageUploadedByHome Brew1433477208.008595.jpg. We mashed with propane on this cool stove from 1925 I salvaged out of a basement View attachment ImageUploadedByHome Brew1433477453.921812.jpg, I converted it from natural gas to propane , it works really well and I can get about a foot and a half to two foot jet of flame coming off of that thing at full blast . We collected the wort in a retired Jim Beam barrel View attachment ImageUploadedByHome Brew1433480945.117130.jpg

 

[dlovin]

We chose cobble stones and local granite for the boil, and a purple flagstone for the finish rocks to put into fermenter . I'm not quite sure if it was because the flagstone got wet in the downpour or if it was just water trapped inside the stones prior to going into the fire, but they exploded fairly violently. With enough force to lift the cover of the furnace . We started by putting the cobblestones in first View attachment ImageUploadedByHome Brew1433496079.484101.jpgView attachment ImageUploadedByHome Brew1433496094.536973.jpg just using a shovel to out the directly into the wort and letting them sit directly on the bottom of the barrel. Then we started putting the rocks into stainless steel steamer baskets that were attached to a length of half inch black pipe using stainless steel chain . This made it much easier to retrieve the rocks when they cooled. The rocks seemed to cool too much if we loaded the basket full of new hot rocks and then walked them over to the barrel, so we submerged the baskets and just brought rocks one by one from the furnace to the barrel and dropped them right into the basket View attachment ImageUploadedByHome Brew1433496576.917330.jpg. It took a lot of stones to get 25 gallons of wort to a boil , but once it was rolling the boil was surprisingly easy to keep up for 90 minutes by just adding a few stones at a time every few minutes . View attachment ImageUploadedByHome Brew1433496870.067341.jpg. We chose purple flagstone for the final finishing stones . These were the last stones to go into the boiling wort . When we lowered the basket of flagstone into the wort it let off an incredible amount of steam . We left those rocks in until we were ready to chill the wort .The flagstones were removed and then placed into a sanitized boil kettle and placed in my freezer to cool to pitching temp.

Since we brewed about 75' away and 12 feet above where the fermenters were, we chose to use gravity to our advantage. Our chiller consisted of 12 feet of high temp silicone tubing running to the a fifty foot IC that sat in a five gallon bucket of ice (we used the IC in reverse pumping the wort through the copper to cool). The wort left that chiller and traveled down a 25' piece of potable water RV hose to the second IC that we had place cooler just outside the door to the basement and the attached another hose to the output of the chiller directly into the fermenters . The chiller contraption worked well after a few small tweaks to it.View attachment ImageUploadedByHome Brew1433498616.217525.jpg. When the fermenters were full we placed the stones in and clamped on the tops and that was that.

If anyone is interested we posted a video of it

http://youtu.be/sh0vsHAB6lQ

 

[beersk]

Wow, that's cool.

 

[dlovin]

Realized the video link may not play in this platform , you may have to go to YouTube and search "steinbier may 31 2015"

 

[mack25]