Maple Mead

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SegmentedMonkey

SegmentedMonkey

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While not a honey mead, and perhaps thus not in the correct forum, I figured that I'd ask since I seem to have discovered a trove of collected meadologists here.

I recently found myself thinking about making a mead, much like a standard sack mead, but with maple syrup as the sugar source, instead of honey. I've found a few recipes on it on the intertubes, but I was curious if anyone had ever tried it. I'm intrigued, but concerned about an overwhelmingly mapley taste. It sounds really nice, and if you went went a #2 or #3 (amber or dark) syrup, I'd wager it would have a beautiful color.
 
SegmentedMonkey said:
While not a honey mead, and perhaps thus not in the correct forum, I figured that I'd ask since I seem to have discovered a trove of collected meadologists here.

I recently found myself thinking about making a mead, much like a standard sack mead, but with maple syrup as the sugar source, instead of honey. I've found a few recipes on it on the intertubes, but I was curious if anyone had ever tried it. I'm intrigued, but concerned about an overwhelmingly mapley taste. It sounds really nice, and if you went went a #2 or #3 (amber or dark) syrup, I'd wager it would have a beautiful color.
Click to expand...

I was thinking about something like this a while back as well. What recipes did you find?
 
Fairly simple recipes, mostly. This is a good example:

Flora's Drink Hideout: Maple Mead

Pretty much maple syrup, water, yeast nutrient and yeast. I'm emailing local maple farms for bulk pricing at the moment. I love living in the Annapolis Valley, there's tons of fruit, vegetable, honey and maple places. You can make anything here!
 
SegmentedMonkey said:
While not a honey mead... I recently found myself thinking about making a mead, much like a standard sack mead, but with maple syrup as the sugar source, instead of honey...
Click to expand...
I have made at least three maple meads (Acerglyn), one of which I managed as a group brew on the BrewBoard in Jan 2006.

They all were made with both honey and maple syrup (Grade B med amber) and turned out very nice. I still have 2 bottles from my 1998 batch that I have been told taste like maple Champagne... ;)
 
hightest said:
They all were made with both honey and maple syrup (Grade B med amber) and turned out very nice.
Click to expand...

What ratio of honey to maple did you use? Apparently there's a worldwide maple syrup shortage at the moment (likely due to the weirdly mild winters we're having in Canada this year), and the price of syrup is through the roof. I could probably wrangle a half and half mixture in order to start a maple mead.. Interesting..
 
I had one that did have some honey and a lot of maple and it was EXTREMELY Maple-y almost like you're drinking alcoholic pancake syrup.

I'd recommend something with a nice rounded maple flavor but not go overboard. This was 10 year old too, and it was still strong as hell on the Maple.
 
SegmentedMonkey said:
What ratio of honey to maple did you use?
Click to expand...
We used 8 lb honey, 6 C (3/8 gal) maple syrup, and 2.5 gal water. Due to the cost, this was an odd-sized (smaller) batch.

My OG was 1.123, which dropped to 0.999 in 10 days. I then added another 1½ C maple syrup to sweeten (the resulting SG changes were: 0.999 -. 1.011, dropping to 1.006 over the next 30 days).

I used Uvaferm-43 yeast.
 
hightest said:
We used 8 lb honey, 6 C (3/8 gal) maple syrup, and 2.5 gal water. Due to the cost, this was an odd-sized (smaller) batch.

My OG was 1.123, which dropped to 0.999 in 10 days. I then added another 1½ C maple syrup to sweeten (the resulting SG changes were: 0.999 -. 1.011, dropping to 1.006 over the next 30 days).

I used Uvaferm-43 yeast.
Click to expand...

Thats interesting. I just pitched a mead about a week and a half ago and I was planning on adding another batch of honey to it at first racking to sweeten. I may fore go the honey and add a few cups of maple syrup instead. Or I may abandon this idea as the more I think of it the less I really want to drink a maple drink, now that I think of it.
 
Here I call maple syrup black gold, it's price seems right between oil and gold. It has always been super expensive but one time walking through Costo I picked up a gallon of generic maple gold and made a basic mead out of it.
It did not last for more than 3 months in bottles, and I did not open a single bottle. My friends re-appropriated them. Stuff is great.
 

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