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