Well, I've been out of brewing for a while, four and a half years to be exact. I think about doing it occasionally but there is always just something else to do it seems. I know this is not a legit excuse because you can make time for whatever you want to do. So what is the longest you've been away from brewing? I feel like I might be a bit rusty if I pick it up, but I assume it's just like riding a bike. Planning on tapping some maples for syrup this spring, anyone have any experience brewing with maple sap? I guess it's basically water with about 1-2% sugar... sounds great!
There was a thread on using maple sap in some forum back in early summer (I think). It seems like the consensus was that it does not create a beer that is anything special as far as extra flavor dimension.
IIRC maple syrup is reduced by a factor of 40. Some places say it is 31 ppg, so sap would be about 0.75 ppg.
I recently have started brewing again after a 7 month break caused by a shitty job with shitty hours. Before that I brewed a 10 gallon batch every month for the past 7 years. The fact that I couldn't brew was actually one of the top reasons that I quit that job. I've tapped my own trees for a few years now but I've never brewed with sap. The 40:1 factor is correct. I get 1 pt. of syrup per 5 gal. of sap. Everything that I have heard has said that you get very little maple flavor because straight sap is so dilute. Next spring I am thinking about reducing down some sap by half and then brewing with it. Maybe then the maple flavor will show through.
I brewed about 1 batch a year from 1988-1993. From the spring of 1993 to summer of 2005, I didn't brew. Mostly, grad school and marriage got in the way, but also because the stuff that I had produced was never very good. In 2005, living away from my wife and having completed degrees, I stumbled across Beer Advocate while googling Chimay White to figure out what the heck I was drinking. I found this forum, where people were insisting they were brewing good, drinkable beer. I have been making about 10-15 batches a year since then. I'm pretty sure I've done over a hundred, but I sort of lost count.
