Maple sap for water for beer?!

Has anyone tried brewing beer with maple sap instead of water? Just for the purpose of incorporating a "terroir" concept to the batch. It's fairly easy to collect 5 gallons of sap in just a week or 2. I imagine if you boil it it will sterilize the sap. Also maybe reduce it only by 1/2 or 3/4 so it can incorporate more fermentables (free ones?!) and give a slight flavor. Any feedback would be great.

Sounds like a great idea!

A friend of mine has done it. There is a nice, subtle "woodsy" background flavor. The sap works very nicely with a porter.

I would try a test with the collected sap, before committing to a full boil of it. You could make a braggot using a couple of gallons (2-4), reduced down to a single gallon... That should help intensify the flavor from the sap, plus add the sugars you're thinking of. Add your normal amount of base malt, and specialty grains to make a solid braggot and you should be set. Of course, you won't really know how it's come out for more than a few months (longer aging time on such large brews)... Just be sure to mash your grains in the medium to full body range, so that it doesn't ferment down too thin...

That sounds interesting. Maybe it would get lost in very hoppy beers.

Golddiggie said:

I would try a test with the collected sap, before committing to a full boil of it. You could make a braggot using a couple of gallons (2-4), reduced down to a single gallon... That should help intensify the flavor from the sap, plus add the sugars you're thinking of. Add your normal amount of base malt, and specialty grains to make a solid braggot and you should be set. Of course, you won't really know how it's come out for more than a few months (longer aging time on such large brews)... Just be sure to mash your grains in the medium to full body range, so that it doesn't ferment down too thin...

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What about any hops or malts that might go with maple/woody flavors.

chefbake said:

That sounds interesting. Maybe it would get lost in very hoppy beers.

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That's why I was going with a Braggot... Or you could do an English BarleyWine, or Old Ale, or a Wee Heavy with it... Go on the lower end of the IBU scale for the brew... If you can, get 5-6 gallons of sap, and reduce the hell out of it... Maybe as low as they do for actual maple syrup, and add a healthy gallon to the brew...

Or just start experimenting with using it... If you have plenty on hand, then you have a 'free' resource to use for sugars in the brew... :rockin:

chefbake said:

What about any hops or malts that might go with maple/woody flavors.

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Personally, I would start with some good UK 2 Row base malt... Add some British Crystal Malt to it (pick the one that matches your flavor concept) and go to town...

I'm brewing my first batch with Honey Malt tomorrow... So far, I've been using honey in my brews, but I want to see what the Honey Malt will give me. I'm adding some BCM to the recipe as well, for more depth.

Start simple, so that you get a better idea of what the reduced sap will give you for flavors... If you have a ton of it on hand, reduce it down to get 5 gallons of ~1.120-1.140 gravity and make a mead with it... :rockin:

I've made maple syrup for several years. Sap is fine, but remember that it's about 1/40 the flavor and sugar of maple syrup. I never took the SG of sap, but I bet it's much lower than you'd think. I doubt you'd get much, if any, flavor from the sap. Boiling it down might help, but I know we use 40 gallons of sap or so for one gallon of syrup, so that's a lot of boiling!

It'd be fun to try it! I wouldn't worry about the beer style too much, but I think a brown ale would be a really good one to experiment with.

I have not but I did try one last year brewed by one of our homebrew club members, Guinness. He is here on HBT under that name so you may want to contact him for some advice. I seem to recall he had enough sap to use it instead of water for the full 5 gallon batch.

The beer was quite good but I didn't detect a lot of the maple flavour coming through. That could very well just be me.

It can add a bit of woodsy flavoring but boiling it down is much better. I boiled 6 gallons down to 2 and then steeped some grains for a maple porter last fall.

5 gallons of sap on its own really wouldn't effect the beer since a really good tree will have about a sugar content of 2% . Like Yooper said it takes 40 or so gallons of sap to make 1 gallon of syrup depending on the tree type.All maple trees make sap some are better than others I have 3 sugar maples and one black maple on my property the sugar maple makes the best but I mix them during the boil.I make it every year and the trees are starting to run now, the maples in my back yard have sap icicles from where the branch was damaged over the winter. I planned on tapping Sunday.

The only change I can see with sap would be from the mineral makeup of the sap .

We were 36 gallons of sap to a gallon of syrup last year. I can't see you getting much maple flavor, if any, in that concentration. If I was to do it, I think I would make a brown ale or porter and use fuggle hops and just add maple syrup to the boil

I've made it a couple of times... planning on doing it again this year. I use sap for mash & sparge water. I made a lighter ale, PA malt, Vienna & Munich w/ noble hops and got something similar to a bock. Sap will raise your ABV, but add no discernible maple flavor. I'm considering doing a maple sap lager this year.

I'm bringing this back up. I brewed Saturday with all sap, no water. The specific gravity of my sap was 1.006 (1.6*). It truly tasted like sweet water. I found that the boil was more vigorous and had a higher boiloff than I planned for. I just topped it off with more sap at the end. I used beersmith for my base (A good stand-alone beer planned with water), and was able to increase "efficiency" by quite a bit. The numbers say that the sap raised my OG by .009 (or ~1% Alc Potential). We'll see if the finish is dry (similar to how honey tends to dry out - lower FG). I am not expecting sweetness in the final product as is. But I do have one pint (same batch of sap) of maple syrup, that I plan to add at kegging time, purely for the hint of aroma and flavor. I'll post an update when it's finished.

Here's a quick update. I'm not sure where papazian said you need a gallon of syrup to get any flavor, because one pint in mine is sweeeeet. As it stands, it's a little too sweet for my taste, but the wife loves it. I will say that prior to adding the syrup, the hydro sample was good, it had that hint of woodsyness that people describe. You truly need to taste it yourself, and then you'll agree to "woodsy".
We've been "cutting" it with some kolsch from the other tap, about 50/50. Takes the edge off of the sweet and gives it a little more hop backbone. If I were to do it again, I'd make those adjustments up front. More hop, less sweet. For me at least.

Thanks for the input. Since we are past maple season now I will consider the maple for next season. My curiosity was in the sap used as a water substitute and not the syrup. I is certainly more of a curiosity. You never know what else is out there

chefbake said:

Thanks for the input. Since we are past maple season now I will consider the maple for next season. My curiosity was in the sap used as a water substitute and not the syrup. I is certainly more of a curiosity. You never know what else is out there

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I had a friend who used sap in place of water for his first homebrew kit and it was one of the best extract beers i can recall having. But i'm curious about using it in AG. Primarily, does it have a ph tendency that would affect the mash? Would the minerals in it have any other effect?