Brewing a Maple Stout w/ Maple Syrup

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Walker Hater

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om working on brewing a 3 Gallon Smiked Maple Stout. Problem is I don't have access to maple sap. I was going to use maple syrup. Will this give the desired flavour, mouth feel? How do I get that rich maple flavour, smell in my finished brew?
Any suggestions/pointers would be appreciated!!!

Regards

JD
 
Maple Syrup will ferment out and not really have a big effect on your mouth feel.. When did you plan on adding the syrup during the brewing process?
 
How do you plan on packaging this.. Keg or bottles? If keg I would think about adding it to the keg before racking beer onto it.. If the keg remains cold, the yeast will go to sleep leaving the maple syrup untouched.
 
Made a 9ish percent imperial stout with coffee and grade c maple syrup added a few days into primary left year. Barely tasted any maple until 3 months in and it's pretty mellow still. Hard to actually pinpoint the flavor unless you're told still. To this day the most "maple-y" beer I've ever had was made with fenugreek.
 
If you want to used actual syrup, the best thing that I can advise you to do is to use the technique More Betterness mentioned. Add some of it during your primary, like maybe half, and then feed the rest to your beer in the secondary. This way you'll avoid the most common fault in maple syrup beers. Making rocket fuel.

If you want to use fenugreek, however, the technique's a little different. Aunt Jemima, anyone?
 
Yeah, whatever you do I wouldn't add it anywhere near the start of the boil. I haven't used maple syrup myself but I've heard nothing but how it's very tough to get the flavor to really come through, so the later in your process you add it the better.
 
Great Notion uses some maple power stuff you can get on Amazon in Double Stack. No idea when they add it but that **** is like drinking straight maple syrup.
 
The brewer at Great Notion responded to my email last year and gave the following pointers:

"Mash low to produce a dry final product, then back sweeten with maple in the keg. Keep cold so it doesn't referment.

If that doesn't produce enough maple character use this at flameout."

He didn't say how much or anything. I just tried it with a BCBS clone and added 8oz at flameout in a 3g test batch. It made the beer SUPER thick like a syrup which I guess should be good for mouthfeel. But, it didn't ferment. Went from 1.110 down to 1.075 and quit.

Built up a new starter for it and pitched that and it didn't budge off of 1.075. Sampled and it didn't even have a ton of maple character. So not sure if that was user error or there just wasn't enough dissolved O2 or what.

I have had better luck with this product and back sweetening in the keg with the darkest maple you can find.

When you open that little vial linked above it reminds me of opening a Double Stack - I opened it in my car after I bought it and my car smelled like maple for days.

The issue I always have is the beer getting too sweet before you get a lot of maple character in the nose. That little vial solves that by giving it a ton of aroma (without the flavor) and then you can add the actual syrup to the keg to get the flavor. Seems like a solid 1-2 punch but I understand a lot of people feel like adding extract or flavoring is "cheating".

My next batch I'm going to do this clone recipe. The users that have brewed that generally have said it has a lot of maple character - they add a bunch of straight maple to primary at high krausen. So the plan is to brew that recipe (bumped up to 10% or so with additional base malt) and then secondary in a maple syrup bourbon barrel I just bought.

Will report back, thanks for the link abawol01
http://www.homebrewtalk.com/showthread.php?t=496504
 
I brewed an imperial maple stout a year and a half ago and have it on tap now.

I used 1.4 lbs of maple syrup (pretty generic organic stuff from the grocery store) at flameout and then added 0.75 tsp of this extract at kegging after sitting on a vanilla bean and coffee for a bit. It went from 1.132 to 1.040, so yes this beer is on the thick and sweet side. It has a great amount of maple flavor though. I'm not sure I would change much other than adding some or all of the maple syrup during fermentation instead of in the kettle.
 
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