Maple sap

[JLem]

Just brewed a beer using maple sap in place of water. It was a small batch since I didn't have a lot of sap and since I wanted this beer to be 100% sap-based.

Just thought I would share a few notes about my experience brewing with the sap:

• specific gravity of my sap was 1.006
• the sap looks, smells, and pretty much tastes like plain water (perhaps with an ever-so-slight sweetness to it)
• when heated/boiled, however, the sap darkened and had a noticeable maple syrup aroma to it
• for my recipe (a strong brown mild), the mash ended up being rather acidic - in the low 5's. Lower than I was expecting. Apparently the maple sap doesn't have much buffering capacity

I'm excited about this experiment. Though the maple sap may not be identifiable in the final beer, I have no doubt that it will add to the complexity.

link to my recipe if anyone is interested - http://brewbybrew.blogspot.com/2013/05/strong-maple-mild.html

 

[mendesm]

Subscribed. Please do keep us posted on the progress of this project.

 

[Rambleon]

Very interesting. Curious to see the results!

 

[mike_in_ak]

I do this with birch sap. A golden ale with sap instead of water.

Final bottle of last years (aged about 1 year) was amazing.

I managed to screw up the year's batch pretty severely, but it's bubbling away.

 

[JLem]

I'll definitely update this thread as the beer progresses.

I managed to screw up the year's batch pretty severely, but it's bubbling away.

In what way did you screw it up?!? Curious minds want to know!

 

[mike_in_ak]

I usually do all grain. With this beer, I use extract because I'm too lazy to figure out sap in my mashtun.

It had been a year, and basically I forgot how to brew an extract beer. I mean, extract is easier right so why get out the book?

But then your sap/water is boiling and you add your boiling hops. And you think to yourself, what am I supposed to with these specialty grains again?

And after you try to fix forgetting to steep your grains, you're looking at your starter and wondering why your starter doesn't look like any other starter you have made before. And you're bottling a different beer at the same time, and while you're holding the corn sugar, you realize you put corn sugar in your starter instead of DME.

And you make a lot more mistakes in the same vein.

It was rushed because I had to use the sap. I was tired and have way too much stuff going on.

I also didn't have drink any home brew (or anything else) until the end, so maybe the debauchery gods were punishing me for my hubris and failure to make the proper sacrifice(s).

 

[JLem]

I usually do all grain. With this beer, I use extract because I'm too lazy to figure out sap in my mashtun.

It had been a year, and basically I forgot how to brew an extract beer. I mean, extract is easier right so why get out the book?

But then your sap/water is boiling and you add your boiling hops. And you think to yourself, what am I supposed to with these specialty grains again?

And after you try to fix forgetting to steep your grains, you're looking at your starter and wondering why your starter doesn't look like any other starter you have made before. And you're bottling a different beer at the same time, and while you're holding the corn sugar, you realize you put corn sugar in your starter instead of DME.

And you make a lot more mistakes in the same vein.

It was rushed because I had to use the sap. I was tired and have way too much stuff going on.

I also didn't have drink any home brew (or anything else) until the end, so maybe the debauchery gods were punishing me for my hubris and failure to make the proper sacrifice(s).

Oh man...glad I don't make extract beers any more

Hopefully the beer will turn out well.

 

[mike_in_ak]

Yeah I'm sure you don't have to use extract, but I'm not very chemistry inclined so skip using sap for an all grain mash.

I also reduce sap first by about half by boiling it down so it's more concentrated.

But birch sap is about 99 to 1 ratio of water to sugar and I think maple is 40 or 50 to 1.

 

[JLem]

Just wanted to follow up on this thread. This beer turned out excellent. It was amazingly flavorful and ended up being a great beer to drink in the Fall. Like I suspected, it was difficult to tease out the sap from the robustness of the recipe (brown malt, crystal malts, English yeast strain). I still have a few bottles left and am hoping to write up some formal tasting notes in the not-too-distant future, but the beer was good enough that I am planning on brewing with maple sap again this Spring. My friend who collected the sap (and who received half the beer), basically commissioned me to brew this up again. To try to get at how much the sap influences the final beer, I might try a second brew using a simpler recipe - maybe a basic SMaSH.

 

[JLem]

Sap was flowing like crazy this year, so another batch of maple sap beer is in the fermenter. I went with a "regular" English mild for this year (as opposed to the dark strong English mild I brewed last year). Nothing new to report on the use of the sap - except this year's batch had a higher sugar content (SG of 1.009 vs 1.006 last year). Pretty excited to see how this one turns out.

If anyone is interested, the detailed recipe can be found at http://brewbybrew.blogspot.com/2014/04/maple-mild.html

 

[philjohnwilliams]

Has anybody ever tried boiling maple sap down to an OG of about 1.050 and fermenting it? I am thinking of trying this if I get a chance and would love to know if anybody has any experience with this.