Maple... Any advice? Syrup vs. crystalized sugar? Anyone?

[HerbieHomebrew]

Going to brew up a smoked maple porter this weekend, but never used maple before in a brew. Any suggestions/advice/tips? Any info is appreciated, thanks all!

[TheDarkSide]

A lot of people use it at kegging/bottling since it will ferment out completely if you add it during the boil. If you looking for maple flavor/aroma, you may want to consider maple extract.

Use grade B syrup if you can find it, since it is less refined and will give you a bigger maple flavor. I actually use B for everything including pancakes.

[HerbieHomebrew]

I thought it might mostly ferment out, but just didnt know to what degree. Wondering how it would do in a secondary... Thanks for the advice on the extract, was trying to do it with just some form of maple, but might have to turn to that.

[livefreebrewfree]

I recently brewed a cinnamon maple steam beer. You couldn't taste the maple at all and I used a pint at flame out and another 1/2 pint in the secondary. Apparently to really get the flavor you need to use close to a gallon in secondary which can be very expensive. One trick would be to use fenugreek which has a strong maple flavor. That's what I'm going to do next time I brew a maple flavored beer.

[dmtaylor]

I haven't made a maple beer yet, but I'm planning to. When I do mine, I'll use a ton (like a gallon or two for 5 gallons), and mash temperature should be like 158 F, and might need to also add a pound of lactose. Maple syrup is low in flavor when blended and is 100% fermentable, so unless you like drinking your beer with a final gravity of like 0.999, you need to do something special to bring the final gravity up to reasonable levels. Unless of course you are extract brewing, in which case you could just add the maple syrup to a John Bull based recipe, where the final gravity is normally like 1.022 anyway because it's not a very fermentable extract.

[livefreebrewfree]

Or you could use fenugreek and get 100% flavor without having to worry about it fermenting out.