THE MEANS OF THE STONE AGE
Mashing with hot rocks isn’t just an antiquated quirk. In fact, we may be able to blame it for human civilization.
For some reason, whenever I imagine ancient peoples anywhere making the earliest beers, I always imagine them huddled around a big cast-iron cauldron over a blazing fire.
That image is wrong, though. There were no metal kettles for direct-fire cooking until the Bronze Age, perhaps 2000 BCE. For long after, at least until the 16th century, kettles remained expensive and rare for common people.
Yet, they brewed.
As Garshol notes in Historical Brewing Techniques—and as numerous raw-ale traditions should make obvious—you don’t need to boil wort to make beer. You do, however, need to heat the mash. And if you’ve got a fire and some rocks, you’ve got a pretty obvious way to go about it.
“Every conceivable variation in brewing process has been used together with hot stones, including varying the grain type and other ingredients,” Garshol writes. “So, it does not really make sense to talk about stone beer as a single style. Stone beer was probably the main branch of beer styles right up until the end of the Middle Ages.”
In fact, Europe is apparently littered with deposits of fire-cracked stones that may have been used for that very purpose.
“Yes, kettles were expensive from the Iron
Age on and later,” says Merryn Dineley, a British archaeologist who specializes in ancient technology—especially in methods and devices related to brewing and malting. “So, hot stones were used traditionally when the mash tun was wooden. However, the technique goes way back into prehistory. Stones have been found in limestone troughs at a site dated to 13,000 years or so ago.”
Those stones are at Göbekli Tepe, an early Neolithic archeological site in southeast Turkey, not far from the Syrian border. It is one of the world’s earliest known human settlements. The roughly 40-gallon troughs there contain a residue that would match that left behind by brewing beer—which, some hypothesize, might be why those people decided to settle down in the first place. While not conclusive, it supports the theory that beer was an important motivator for people to stop roaming and grow crops.
Reports on such findings often refer to evidence of “cereals.” However, as Dineley says, cereals are not enough to make beer—those cereals need to be malted; those sugars need to be converted before yeast can ferment them. In fact, that desire to make malt and malt sugars—not only a source of beer, but of valuable calories—might have been the real reason to settle down and grow grains in the grasslands. As Dineley notes, there is evidence of malting about 13,000 years ago in Israel’s Raqefet Cave.
“The question,” she writes, “should not be ‘Bread or beer?’ but, ‘Who were the first maltsters?’”
So, in fact, those farmhouse brewers still using hot stones to heat their mashes in the Baltics, Finland, and Russia may be carrying on a technique that is at the very root of civilization. —Joe Stange
What’s certain is that it must have been very different from the many re-creations of “steinbier” inspired by Michael Jackson’s report from Rauchenfels. Here are the key takeaways: Steinbier was a raw ale, and the hot stones went into the mash, not the wort. If anything was boiled at all, it was the mash.
Most writing about steinbier emphasizes that the stones they used were greywacke, a type of gray sandstone. The commercial breweries in 20th century Klagenfurt did use that type of stone, but we also know that other brewers used porphyritic diorite, and some a red sandstone. The important thing is to use a type that doesn’t explode when heated, since that can be dangerous.
More Stone-beer Traditions
What’s so special about Austria, anyway? Weren’t kettles equally expensive elsewhere?
Yes, they were—and, as it turns out, people have brewed with hot stones all over Europe. The more famous steinbier style comes from Carinthia simply because brewing with hot stones survived for so long in commercial brewing there. Again, that’s probably because it’s such an isolated
We should really think of stone beer as a mashing method, like infusion or decoction mashing. The actual beers could be of many different kinds.
area with a population large enough to keep the tradition going.
However, there are well-documented reports of stone-beer brewing from all the Nordic and Baltic countries plus Russia and Belarus. In northern Russia, there are still people brewing stone beer; the tradition is not entirely dead in Latvia and Lithuania, either. It’s likely that people once brewed with hot stones in Franconia, too, even if we have no record of it.
The stone beers in these countries were not all weak beers fermented with hefeweizen yeast and made from barley, oats, and wheat smoked with cherry wood. What they do have in common is the use of hot stones in the mash rather than in the wort. We should really think of stone beer as a mashing method, like infusion or decoction mashing. The actual beers could be of many different kinds.
In Finland, the Hollolan Hirvi brewpub way out in the countryside is still making stone-mashed sahti. The brewer, Ilkka Sipilä, learned the method from his father in the 1960s. So, if you want, you can taste authentic stone beer today. All you have to do is go to Finland.