At 10:45 AM, the first five of 235 gallons splashed into our enormous stainless brew kettle. Arranged in a confusion only a chaos theorist could appreciate were 22 homebrewers and their brew systems, plus wives, kids and dogs. What were four mid-Michigan homebrew clubs doing on a sunny Saturday in the summer of 2001? Fire Brew! An ambitious event months in the planning.

Maybe it was because Sean Royston, president of the Red Ledges Homebrewers, has a large brewhouse and lots of room. Maybe it was the 250-gallon, stainless-steel vessel that Karl Glarner rescued from a commercial bakery eight years ago. Maybe it was growing up 100 miles from Stroh’s Brewery and hearing thousands of “The King of Fire-Brewed Beer” commercials during adolescence. Or maybe it was just having four homebrew groups in one county. Whatever the confluence of factors, there was only one answer: Fire Brew.

For almost a decade, Karl Glarner, owner of the Red Salamander homebrew shop in Grand Ledge, Michigan, has carried a massive stainless-steel tank as he moved from residence to residence. “It’s so large we were thinking of using it for a hot tub,” he says. The temptation to brew a commercial-sized batch of beer, 250 gallons or eight barrels, proved stronger than sybaritic comfort. But how could we bring eight barrels of sweet wort to a full rolling boil? Fire! Leaping flames and red-hot coals was the answer.

Sean and his brother Todd offered the shovels, digging a fire pit in Sean’s backyard and lining it with fire brick. Next was lining up at least twenty all-grain homebrewers to haul in their own equipment. Their job was to heat 320 gallons of water and lauter 490 pounds of grain.

You do the math: Most homebrewers brew five-gallon batches and lauter ten to fourteen pounds of grain. A few brew ten gallons with twenty to thirty pounds of grain and fewer still have equipment for fifteen-gallon batches. Fortunately, the Red Ledges Homebrewers, Lansing Brew Crew, Mid Michigan Maltmeisters and Firkin Home Rackers of Williamston have several brewers capable of lautering 30 to 50 pounds. Even with everyone in place, we figured the lautering would take half a day.

A date was set, committed brewers signed a pledge to attend, and the game was afoot. Or rather, aboil. Brew Your Own aided this massive effort, arranging for Chris White of White Labs to contribute some free yeast. We selected WLP820 (Oktoberfest Lager), plus WLP001 (California Ale) and WLP029 (German Ale/Kölsch) for those without lagering facilities. Briess provided the entire grain bill.

Notes from a red-hot brew day

There is a great saying, “Murphy was an optimist.” Maybe true, maybe not. But to gather so many homebrewers with their individual burners and kettles, hot liquor tanks, mash paddles, sparge arms, lauter tuns and general paraphernalia would seem to issue Murphy a personal invitation.

He never appeared. However, such a huge undertaking did help each of us understand some of the difficulties of large-scale brewing — like not requesting crushed grain when talking to Briess. Fortunately, Gruber thought of that little detail. And at noon, three hours after the first mash tun was filled, we were still doling out grains. “If Mary Anne hadn’t been smarter than us and sent precrushed grain, we’d still be crushing,” Glarner said.

Our recipe was the carefully-formulated winner of last year’s Lansing Brew Crew Oktoberfest (see recipe at right.) But how the heck could we mix 490 pounds of grain? So instead of a uniformly mixed, even proportion of base and specialty grains, some brewers got mostly Briess Bonlander with some Dextrine and Vienna, while others mashed Ashburne and Victory. Every batch of sweet wort was different, not only because of technique, but due to the variable grist.

Notes from a massive mash

According to the database I used to reformulate the recipe from 10 to 200 gallons, mashing-in would require 153 gallons of 161° F water. Mash-out needed 170 gallons of boiling water. So mash-out and sparge water proved to be the largest problem; brewers were fighting for hot water all day.

At noon we had 110 gallons in the kettle with lots of hot break churning in the wort. (Of course, some of us were having a big argument about whether it was hot break or sloppy sparging and chunks of grain. I think hot break won our nickel bet.) Sprinkled around the grounds were kettles, burners and stands, mash tuns, chairs, kids running through sprinklers, coolers, Frisbees and busy brewers. At 1 PM we calculated we’d hit 194.5 gallons of wort, with a mere 25.5 to go.

Someone wondered aloud what the current gravity was. Nobody actually knew (or really cared), but curiosity has a way of winning when homebrewers gather. Interestingly, the recipe software I use said 240 gallons at 80% efficiency would result in a gravity of 1.054. We actually sparged about 235 gallons, had some boilover (very minimal considering the vigor of the boil) and OG was 1.054 at 72° F. We all agreed that the crush of the grains was a huge contributor to the absolutely amazing utilization we got.

First hops, almost two pounds of Tettnanger — all donated by the Red Salamander — went in for 90 minutes. The kettle had been boiling since 190 gallons. Thirty minutes later, at 2:30 PM, a second addition of Tettnanger whole hops was added. Saaz at 15 minutes and zero would finish the hop additions. The fire was extinguished — with lots of sparks and steam — at 3.

We failed to place a stainless-steel scrubber into the discharge channel, which meant we could have a significant amount of trub in our runoff. That’s where the ten-foot paddle that Tolin Annis made came in; a good whirlpool would lessen the trub discharge, as would the use of bagged hops. Our extremely vigorous boil would surely utilize most of the hops.
Tolin built a PhilChill-based counterflow chiller, I built another, and I also brought the original 10-foot BYO all-copper chiller plus another 20-foot copper model. We also decided to use a large immersion chiller set in a 40-gallon ice bath as a prechiller for the cooling water. By running water through the copper tubing immersed in ice water, we could prechill the water entering the counterflow chiller. After all, with 200 gallons to cool and two chillers, that still meant at least 100 minutes (one gallon per minute, 212° to 80°) of run-off.

At 3:15, a line of carboys that reached from the kettle to the Royston brothers’ brew house awaited filling. As the kettle drained and the hop bags became exposed, some threatened to jump into the kettle and foot-squeeze the plump bags like oversized grapes. Luckily, nobody acted on this dangerous idea. Instead, we squeezed the hop bags between two mash paddles. We estimate that the seven pounds of hops sponged up ten gallons of liquid, more than most folks brew!

Any good thing has to end, and the first Fire Brew shut down at 6 PM. Everyone was satisfied, but completely whipped. The work and fierce sun had done its work. All that remained was to wait impatiently for a chance to gather and sample our fire-brewed beer ...and start making plans for Fire Brew II! (For details, see the November 2002 issue of BYO, page 44.)

Fire Brew Oktoberfest Recipe
(approximately 200 gallons, all-grain)

• 200 lbs. Briess Bonlander (Munich)
• 150 lbs. Briess Ashburne (mild ale)
• 90 lbs. Briess Vienna
• 25 lbs. Briess Dextrine
• 25 lbs. Briess Victory
• 28 oz. Tettnanger (90 minutes)
• 23 oz. Tettnanger (30 minutes)
• 21 oz. Saaz (15 minutes)
• 21 oz. Saaz (0 minutes)
• White Labs WLP820 (Oktoberfest)