I brewed a maple stout a couple years ago and in researching it then, I found out about the difficulties of getting the maple flavor to come through. At the time, I put some syrup in at the end of the boil, then I primed with syrup with I bottled. After a week or so, it tasted great, but shortly after, the maple flavor was gone.
I want to try and brew one again, but I’ve got a different approach this time. I may still put some syrup in the boil, but I’ll keg this batch and will prime with syrup again and let it self carb. I may still have the same problem with the flavors leaving, though. My solution is to put the keg in the fridge, get it cold, then add maple syrup. My thinking is that the yeast will be dormant, so they won’t eat up the syrup. Will it work that way?
I plan to do an pumpkin maple porter here soon. I will use extract for flavoring at kegging time. I will also use maple syrup as well during fermentation. But I want to keep the flavor around after fermentation.
I’ve made a couple of maple porters I was really happy with. Both used a fairly standard porter as the base recipe. On one of them I added an entire gallon of dark (grade b) syrup. I added it to the primary in stages (quart at a time) after initial fermentation was mostly done. It definitely had a maple flavor - but it also was ridiculously strong and had so much syrup in it that it was arguably a maple wine / beer hybrid thing. A lot of people really liked it, but I also got a lot of complaints that it “didn’t taste like beer”. Your mileage may vary.
A later one I did I replaced all of the mash and sparge water with fresh maple sap, donated by a friend who makes his own syrup (one of the advantages of living in New Hampshire). Now, when you make syrup, you boil the crap out of it forever, to reduce it by a factor of 20:1 or more. So all that sap is roughly equivalent to only about a quart of syrup. Despite this I still ended up with a strong maple flavor. I guess maybe because my sap didn’t get boiled nearly as much as syrup would so it retained more flavor? My original intent was to add more syrup after the primary, to make something more like the beer I described above. But I tasted a sample and liked it so much I decided to leave it alone. This ended up being probably the most universally loved beer I’ve ever made. I highly recommend this method if you have access to sap. Got the idea from someone on this forum btw, so thanks whoever you were.
That extract stuff above sounds interesting, I may give it a try some day. Way less of a pain in the butt.
