I’ve been starting to get an itch to brew a Maple Wine lately. Anyone here have any experience with one? I’m thinking of handling it exactly like a sack mead: Mix in enough water to target OG of 1.150; mix the hell out of it to aerate, pitch 71B rehydrated with GoFerm, staggered nutrient additions & degassing, etc. Does this sound reasonable?
I’ll hit up a couple of my local sugar shacks until I find the best Grade B syrup I can get my hands on and hope I can score a bulk discount.
Never done it, but sounds reasonable. I’d expect it not to have many nutrients so treating it like honey should work. I’d check the pH too and consider adjusting acidity.
Let me know how it turns out. I have wanted to do one for a really long time but the cost ohhh the cost. I am putting 2.5 lb of maple in the barley wine I brewed this weekend and even that’s gonna cost 30 bucks. you are going to need like 5 lb per gallon or more to got to 1.150 if my math is not completely off basically you are talking about 1:1 dilution with water. Syrup comes in around 1.3~1.4 so a half gallon will weigh a little over 5 lb (at 39*f).
When I was a kid in VT I could walk up the road and get a half gallon of syrup for 8 bucks if I brought my own container. I suspect even with a bulk discount a 5 gallon batch is going to be in the area of 150-300 bucks.
I will do this someday I really will. In the meantime I will follow your adventures.
A friend who makes TONS of mead told me that years ago he made a maple mead with 1/2 maple and 1/2 honey. Sadly I never had any, but he said it came out tasting much like bourbon.
Yeah, only going to do a 1-gallonish pilot batch specifically because of the cost.
Speaking of bourbon flavor - I was thinking of aging this on wood. I’d love to use maple, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen maple cubes/chips/spirals anywhere. Although, if my only option is oak, I may wait for a future batch to try that.
You can buy some maple at the local big home improvement store. It won’t be toasted, but I’m not sure if toasted maple is good. Actually, I have no idea what, if any, flavor maple wood will provide. Looks like only have couple (The Bruery and Lawson’s Finest) breweries have made maple barrel aged beer.
Woodford reserve did a maple aged burbon with toasted, but not charred maple barrels.
http://chuckcowdery.blogspot.com/2010/09/do-maple-barrels-look-different.html
Interesting info about the toasted maple. I think I can find chips for a wood smoker and try my hand at toasting them. Thanks for the tip.
ive heard that using sap has more maple flavor than the actual syrup but i presume the gravity of that is low, maybe just add maple syrup to maple sap? let us know how this turns out cause i have a few good friends who make maple syrup. They already challenged me to make them a maple wine or beer after they tried my rum raisin braggot
maple sap has very little flavour and is only about 2-3% sugar. It’s nice and if you can get acccess to enough it is amazing just carbed up all by itself. very slightly sweet. Lawsons Finest in VT makes a beer using sap as the brewing liquour but for a wine I think you would have to use syrup just to get the gravity you want. If you make your own I suppose you could stop the boil when you hit your target OG but I don’t know that you would get the robust flavours you get with the long 20:1 reduction boil,
Actually, most of the maple syrup flavors are due to caramelization of the sugars during the boil.
Just to keep this thread updated, I got this batch started on Friday. I have 1 & 5/8 gallons of 1.151 OG must churning away. I couldn’t source any local Grade B syrup in the quantities I was looking for, so I grabbed 3 of these on Amazon:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B005C3IVN8/ref=oh_details_o00_s01_i05
It had some good reviews and tastes really nice. I’ll keep everyone posted on how this turns out. If it works out well I’ll be hunting the farmers markets in the spring for local syrup.
I have a buddy who’s in-laws run a maple syrup business. He said he gets maple syrup from them every year and decided to do this a few years ago. The first batch was good but a little hot. He has since perfected the recipe and methods and the latest one I tried was really good.
His friend, who is a brewer, decided to do a big batch of it. He has almost one barrel of it fermenting right now and it tastes spectacular. I’ll email him and ask about his process.
Got a Progress Report on this? I live in MA and my brewing buddy loves maple flavors, And his dad works in Vermont, so we could source syrup on the cheap.
Cheers,
Jeff
if it’s who i think it is th Maple Wine is awesome.
Treat the syrup as honey, diluting to your target OG and follow the modern day (Ken Schramm of Schramm’s Meads, he wrote the book) Mead process.
That’s funny, I was just coming here to post a bit of a followup. I racked to secondary and took a sample today. 3 months in and it went from 1.151 to 1.058. My basement has been a lot colder than usual this winter (last year it barely dipped below 62F, this year it’s been mid-to-low-50’s since January). I’m hoping that things are still going slowly, because it is still way too sweet if it finished up here. The gravity sample was still a lot like sipping maple syrup. At this point it calculates to be about 12%, but the sweetness completely masks the alcohol. There is a nice warming in the belly at the end though. It’s still pretty hazy at this point.
At this point my gameplan is to recheck the gravity in another week or so. If its still stalled out then I will bring it up to room temp and see if it goes any further. At that point I’m not sure if I should pitch another packet of yeast, or if I should brew another batch at a lower gravity (thinking 1.080-1.100 range) that should ferment down to around 1.000 and use that to blend back.
The lees at the bottom of the fermenter were quite interesting. There was a fine layer of pitch black sediment on top of the yeast layer. I wish I had taken a picture.
Thanks for the interest. I’ll keep you updated on how things are going.
I remember Ken Schramm giving a mead presentation saying that you usually get 100 points of attenuation out of yeast (max). If that’s true, yours might be finished at 93 points fermented. You could maybe get it further with distillers yeast? Blending might help. Age may help it dry out too.
I generally get 120-130 points out of 71B in meads using staggered nutrient additions when fermented in the mid-60’s. The only significant change to my process (aside from using maple syrup instead of honey) was the significantly cooler temps. But yes, I have strongly considered that it could just be finished at this point.
Since my calculations put it at about 12% right now, I’m concerned whether that’s too high to pitch more yeast into. I’m also not sure whether I should add any more nutrient additions if I do go that route.
Add a growler of yeast slurry, a full working population from a neutral source
Well, it’s officially stalled out. Same exact gravity reading today as it was 4 days ago. I brought it up to room temp just in case that may restart things, otherwise I may try making a starter in a low gravity maple syrup must to see if I can get it to take off. Otherwise, it looks like a new batch for blending is called for.
I did some measured dilutions with water using the gravity sample. Undiluted, it is smooth but warming going down, syrupy, and has notes of bourbon and maple.
I then diluted it 3:1 with water. The resulting dilution (approx 9% abv, 1.044) was not quite as warm, but still quite syrupy. At this level of dilution a fruity vinous character really starts to shine through.
The final dilution was 3:2 with water. This calculates to about 7% and 1.035. At this dilution the vinous character drops off, but it becomes even more fruity. There is still quite a bit of syrupy sweetness left at this point.
I’m thinking that if I’m going to make another batch to dilute, I need to plan on something that will get me in the low-to-mid 1.020’s and keep my abv above 9%. I think there is a lot of room for experimentation here once I drill down my process a bit better. I like both the bourbon character I got at higher abv as well as the vinous character from more moderate levels. Despite the underattenuation, I’m liking where this has gone so far.