Looking for maple brown ale recipe

I have a brown ale in bottles right now that I'm pretty happy with. I tinkered with the recipe some and I think I'm going to rebrew it early in the fall as a maple brown ale--my plan is just to add a pound of dark maple syrup in secondary, and then also use a maple syrup solution as bottling sugar probably. My recipe is for a pretty low-gravity and pretty thick bodied brown ale, so the extra alcohol and thinness from the syrup shouldn't be a problem. But I haven't tried this yet so I'd also be interested in feedback.

Presumably the other thing that would definitely work would be to use pure maple extract and just add to taste to any brown ale at bottling time. That would probably work better than my method actually, but somehow it seems like cheating.

 

Oh here's the recipe. This is a pretty sweet and full bodied brown ale, and on the dark side too leaning toward a light porter, so I think it will be a good base recipe for a maple brown. For the first batch I just used 75% maris otter then 5% each of flaked oats, honey malt, victory malt, brown malt, chocolate malt. I tinkered with the grain bill based on results from first batch and came up with this:

Batch size 5.5 gal
Mash 154 degrees

7.5 lbs Maris Otter
0.6 lbs Honey Malt
0.6 lbs Brown Malt (Thomas Fawcett)
0.4 lbs Caramel 80
0.3 lbs Chocolate Malt
0.3 lbs Victory Malt
0.3 lbs Flaked Oats
1.0 lb Maple Syrup (in secondary)

1 oz East Kent Goldings 60 min
1 oz East Kent Goldings 15 min

Ferment with either WY1968 or WLP002.

 

Try emailing the brewery and see if they are willing to toss the recipe at you. Some brewers are humbled and happy to give homebrewers their recipes so they can give it a go. If they say no...then they say no. Good luck!

 

I have never brewed a Maple Brown Ale so I do not have any specifics to contribute here. For those of you in the Philly area I would highly encourage you to go to Iron Hill Phoenixville, PA brewpub for:

“Sugar Shack Brown Ale

OG: 1.076 Color: 19 IBU: 35 Alc by Vol: 8.0%

An Imperial Nut Brown ale, full bodied beer with a distinct nutty malt flavor and aroma, brewed with 60 lbs of pure Vermont maple syrup”

Sugar Shack Brown Ale is a totally awesome beer that was formulated by Matt Gundrum (a very talented brewer). This is the second time that Matt has made this beer and this batch is outstanding as well. This beer is almost indescribable: it has complex flavors of dark malts, the word “nutty” is very appropriate and there is a silkiness which I am guessing comes from the maple syrup but I could be wrong about that.

Something which may be noteworthy to the OP: Matt added the maple syrup at the end of the boil; he did not add it to a secondary.

Cheers!