I start the kiln fire just after 3 a.m., shrouded in a heavy fog that covers the back garden. My phone tells me that it is currently 4 Celsius, or about 39 Fahrenheit, down here in small-town South Bohemia; the digital thermometer says that inside the kiln it is 8 C, a decent serving temperature for beer. Despite the damp and cold, the flames catch on the second match, after which the fire chamber glows only dimly.
In large part, I have no idea what I am doing. I’m not a ceramicist of any kind. I am merely helping my wife, Nina, though in so doing I have come to appreciate the art and craft of turning clay into vessels. In Prague, Nina uses a gas kiln for the majority of her pottery, as do many modern potters. But down here in South Bohemia, she has a second, wood-fired kiln for a limited amount of wood-fired vases, mugs, bowls, and other pots. Firing a kiln that burns logs is difficult, time-consuming work, often lasting 18 hours or more. In order to keep Nina from having to finish up at midnight, I’m getting things started early.
Compared to a modern gas or electric kiln, wood firing is wildly inconvenient, roughly akin to the difference between a modern car with an automatic transmission and some kind of early, steam-powered vehicle. With wood, exact temperatures are very hard to control. Accidents happen more often than you’d like. Shelves collapse. If temperatures rise too quickly, pots will explode, blasting shards into other pots, possibly ruining the entire load. It also produces ungodly beautiful work at times, resulting in unusual surface patterns and bizarre textures as the flames and heat reach different sides of the pots in different ways. It is tedious and difficult, stressful and exhausting, but it is worth it to make something beautiful the old-fashioned way.
However, making beautiful things is not my task. My job is simply to start the fire and heat things up slowly.
Despite the work—mostly on my knees in the pre-dawn dark, peering into the firebox and feeding small pieces of wood, then just slightly larger pieces to the flames—I have time to think about the parallels between craft beer and craft pottery. At first glance, they seem to have a lot of differences. One is liquid and the other is solid, of course, but I’ve been to many breweries that still use wood-fired kettles, requiring the same work that I am doing now, albeit generally inside a building. Like the mash temperatures used in brewing beer, there are specific kiln temperatures that we want to hit and hold for specific amounts of time. More broadly, both activities are about making something with care and skill.
In fact, quite a few people in the world of craft beer have connections to craft ceramics, like Good Beer Hunting contributor Lily Waite, who writes about beer, runs Queer Brewing, and makes pottery. The U.K.’s great Indian-street-food-and-craft-beer-vendor Bundobust recently worked with the Manchester ceramicist Joe Hartley to create a line of gorgeous, handmade steins for Bundobust’s Oktoberfest celebration.
Wood-firing is more esoteric, but it still has its connections to the world of good beer and good drinks. When I interviewed Tom Jacobs at Antidoot Wilde Fermenten in Belgium earlier this year, we spent much of our time talking about the new wood-fired kiln on the Jacobs farm that is now being used to produce Antidoot Wild Ceramics. When I interviewed master distiller Jared Himstedt at Balcones Distilling for an article about wood, smoke, and whiskey a few months later, he acknowledged the unpredictability of working with wood.
“It’s fire,” he said. “It’s not extremely replicable, the exact same every time, no variability.”
Balcones also makes beer, and he wanted me to know that the distillery even has a Lukr side-pull faucet. And then, as he was finishing up his thoughts on smoke and fire, he shared something unexpected that often comes back to me.
“I did a lot of ceramics when I was younger—I thought I was going to be a ceramics teacher, and I really gravitated towards wood-firing,” he said. “In the Korean and Japanese roots of the wood-firing ceramic tradition, they talk about ‘surrendering’ the pots. You get these pots made, you brick it up, you start the fire in the fire chamber, and to some degree after that, it’s a little bit out of your hands. You surrender it to the fire. And when you open it up, you find out what the fire gifted you with.”
I turn all of these things over in my mind as I feed the flames. Occasionally I take notes on the fire: In the early hours, even the slightest heat from the kiln is welcome, helping me shake off the chill. At around 350 C, the smell and appearance of the smoke coming out of the chimney changes noticeably, probably because of some kind of chemical sublimation or oxidation. Up to about 550 C, I can feed the flames bare-handed, but after that I have to put on a pair of long, heavy leather gloves, like those used by workers in steel mills. At 600 C I singe my hair, which I can clearly smell through the smoke. At 800 C I’m starting to burn my fingers through the leather gloves. It’s still cold, so I am wearing a heavy sweatshirt, but at the points where my body directly faces the flames, it feels like the recycled polyester shirt I have on underneath might have melted into my skin.
After starting the kiln at a Czech beer’s serving temperature, I hand things over to Nina at 900 C, after which she works, curses, and cajoles the fire up to 1,350 C or so, meaning well past 2,400 F. This is the real work of wood-firing, requiring much more skill and expressing more of the potter’s art through variations on temperature, time, and the amount of oxygen, all of which can drastically change the appearance of the pots. By the time she finishes, flames are climbing out of the chimney; she still wears sunglasses long after sundown, because the firebox is as bright as a second sun. In fact, the entire kiln is glowing. Like brewing, it is extremely hard work, something that most outsiders will never recognize.
