Brewing with maple sap?

[captianoats]

I think I may tap a couple maple trees in my yard, but instead of making syrup, I want to try brewing with the sap. I've done a little research, and whatI've found is that the maple flavor is subtle, the gravity of the sap is around 1.008-1.010, and it can ferment dry.

Has anyone done this, and what did you think?

 

[causeimthesquid]

I have brewed with maple syrup multiple times; adding to end of boil, secondary, and even priming bottles.

I haven't used sap, though I meant to use the last week or so of maple runnings for brewing water. With syrup, I have found you wind up with more of a woody flavor than maple. If you really want a maple flavor, you need to use fenugreek - which sort of ruins your whole objective here I would assume.

I'd say try it. Its pretty easy to collect 10 gallons of sap, and you are really only losing out on a little more than a pint of potential maple syrup.

Based on how subtle the flavor would be, I don't know what style you would like to brew.

 

[captianoats]

I'm not really trying to make a maple flavored beer, it's more of an experiment just to see what happens.

As far as style, I've considered brown ale, Vienna lager, pilsner, or maybe a porter.

 

[krackin]

"Subtle" is an understatement. You could replace it with Nonatoll and never note a difference.

 

[JRems]

I did this just to try it. I used it for all the water in the beer( mash and sparge) It gave almost no flavor to the beer. The sap actually contains minerals as well and really messed up my mash ph. It might come out better in a extract batch, but I would not mash with it again.

 

[Zepth]

Having experience boiling sap to syrup its on average a 40:1 ratio. Meaning if you use only sap instead of water it would be the same as adding 1/8 of a gallon of syrup, which with my famous "quick math" technique comes out to just under a pint. Sap does have many minerals in our case usually calcium and iron. Mileage will vary based on ground mineral contents.

When you tap your trees you want to do it when the days are around +5C 41F during the day and -5C 23F overnight. Store it somewhere relatively cool and out of the sun. Only use clear sap! When it starts getting latter in the season the sap starts turning yellow, as soon as the tree buds it's all over. Pull you taps and wash them off for next year.

With syrup you want a slow boil, too high heat concentration can cause sugar crystals. I don't think there'd be nearly enough sugar/water ratio for this to be a problem with brewing but thought it would be noteworthy.

I thought about it before, and figured it would be much easier to just to toss in some syrup and be done with it. Also allows for better timing of non malt sugar additions.