Brewing Over an Open Fire

This past weekend, in honor of National Homebrew Day, I returned to 'the land' in central WI where a friend and I brewed and buried a black lager a few years back.  (see story also on this blog).  Our goal for the weekend was to cut down some trees, clean up the site, and brew beer over an open flame.


I did no research on this method before I packed up the van and drove 4 hours for the event.  I figured part of the fun was going to be just 'figuring it out', it doesn't hurt to have a friend who is also a paper chemistry engineer (math guy), i knew we'd create a viable plan on site.  The recipe was a friends delicious Robust Porter. 

We dug a shallow pit to shield some of the wind (20-30mph this day), built up a structure for the kettle and got a fire going. 

I was concerned that the space between the pavers wasn't going to be big enough to put enough wood in to generate the heat we needed to boil 7 gallons of wort for an hour.  I was pleasantly surprised by the efficiency!

It took 60 minutes to bring 50 degree water to 154 degree mash temp.  Not bad! 

I decided to use the Brew in a Bag process for steeping my grains.  I'd never used this process before, but i have to tell you, it's slick!  Since I was traveling with my brewery, I wanted to go light.  A large nylon bad takes up a lot less space in the minivan than a mash cooler!

The mash rest required some attention.  We had to move the kettle on and off the fire to maintain a 154 temp.  The temps fluctuated from 149 to 162 during this process. The cooler air temps and steady wind cooled the mash quickly and the coal base stoked the temps up quickly.

It took another 40 minutes to bring the wort up from 154 to 212, again, not bad!  We had to play around with our wind shields to get the proper heat from the fire.  Too much protection and we cut off the oxygen supply...  to little and the fire was escaping around the kettle itself.

A word on scorching.  As you can see in this photo -->, the bottom of my kettle got pretty scorched!  I was going to wrap it in tin foil, but I forgot it...  Another method to try is the old boyscout trick of dish soap on the kettle.  Note for next time.

As the kettle was pulled off the fire post boil, I just used a green scrubby pad and water to scrub the kettle clean.  The soot on the side of the kettle came off pretty easily, the bottom is pretty bad, even after the scrub. 

Murry creek runs through the land, so we used it as our wort cooler.  The wort went from 190 to 68 in about 30 minutes.  Thank you Mother Nature!

All in all I only went through about 10-12 pieces of dried oak to complete the entire heating process.  My hope is that some of that smoke flavor will be present in the beer.  We'll see in a few months!

It was a fun day and a successful experiment.  I'd recommend anyone try it, no need to fear a complicated set up.  Besides, if it does go south? a propane tank and burner can be standing by to bail you out.

Brew on!
-Chris