Before you boil the malt with the rocks, you have to make the malt. To do this from scratch, you get some malted barley, roasted to various degrees, crush it, mix it with hot water, then hold it at the correct temperature for 1 hr. After that you rinse the malt out of the grain. At the end of the hour, as I lifted the esky to start draining out the malt, the handle broke.

About two thirds of the grain, and most of the malt syrup ended up on the paving, and down my legs. "Bother" I said. How embarrassing with all my brew friends standing here ready to put hot rocks in. So I started again, crushed some more grain, made up a new recipe as I didnt have the right grains left. 2 hours later than planned we had a big pot full of malt syrup ready to boil.

Meanwhile the rocks were being heated in a bonfire using jarrah demolition timber.

To the point where they were glowing red. Here Darryn is trying to get one of the hottest rocks out, and despite wearing a face shield and welders gloves, is finding it a bit warm.

Then we added the rocks to the malt. The result was a spectacular foamy boil. We changed the rocks a few times, and the cooled rocks were kept as they have caramelized malt burnt on to them. These will be put back in the beer at the last stage before it is bottled, to add a caramel taste to the beer.

One of the reasons for boiling is to reduce the amount of water in the beer. I was expecting to evaporate 4 l over an hour. In fact we evaporated 10 l in an hour, as you can see from the plume of steam.

Since we had a fire full of coals, we used them to cook a beercan chicken on the left, and a beercan turkey on the right. Due to the brewing disasters, lunch didnt get served until about 5 pm. But the turkey was very moist and well cooked.

A typical brew day table. While all the brewing is going on, everyone is trying each others beers and swapping recipes.