I have two 55 gallon drums… I made a box to keep one of them cold. Now I need to steam a lot of rice to fill that first drum up. Here’s what I came up with:
I have a few more pictures here:
http://blog.kuracali.com/?p=28
and I’ll upload some more when I put some rice in it and steam it up.
cool idea - I’ve seen pics of the steamers they use in Japan and they look like they’re heated with jet engines.
My two cents, I think you will need more heating elements to make this work right(10). You can’t just boil the water you have to boil so much that the steam is forced out through the rice… love to see this in action - keep us posted.
Keeping you posted! I insulated the drum and that allowed two heating elements to bring five gallons of water to a vigorous boil, even in that massive heat-radiating steel structure. I have not steamed any rice in it yet. Soon…
Hey chuck,
Thanks for keeping us updated. It is always fun to see people who are taking a different approach to homebrewing compared to some of us others, and are actually skilled enough to just go out and build that stuff. Either way good luck on steaming those rice and if you find yourself having problems gettibg sufficient amounts of steam try to isolate the top partially with some kind of cloth in order to trap the steam in some. 
Regards,
Claes nilsson
I steamed 12 pounds of rice yesterday:
I stacked 6 of those grill-tops with cheesecloth and the very middle of each grill didn’t get steamed quite as well as the rest of the stack. Next weekend I’ll steam 30 pounds… I’ll do two batches of 15 lbs just to play it safe. This next time I’ll leave a hole in the middle of each layer so steam can come up inside.
More pictures:
http://blog.kuracali.com/?p=106
I don’t know but if there is a way to seal each level so that the steam has to flow through the rice I think it would work better. Your setup may be closer to a continuous steaming setup than the steam pots used at most kura. I don’t know how they get the steam into the rice on these continuous systems.
What I have seen it that to get an uniform steaming you must make sure that the rice is evenly distributed. Furthermore the steam must not be able to escape e.g. by going around the rice. So filling the entire steamer with rice from side to side with an evenly distributed rice layer would give the optimal result. Then you do not need any holes as the steam will work its way through the rice much more even.
