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Official Community Brew - Maple Porter
supplies are in, brewing tomorrow!!!
I racked mine off into the secondary on Sunday. I put the 8oz. syrup in and I did end up putting in another cinnamon stick. When I sampled the cinnamon mellowed a lot, almost disappeared, nor could I really pick up much of a maple flavor either. Sure hope that late maple addition helps in that department, it would suck to have a maple porter with little maple flavor.
This is probably the lightest colored porter I've ever made and it did have a fair hop bitterness to it. Probably will bottle on the 25th.
Brewed today, Measured Original Gravity: 1.047 SG.
everything went well
I'll be racking over to the secondary tonight. Instead of adding just half of the maple syrup at the beginning, I added the full thing. The latest tastes seem to be pretty good with a fairly strong maple flavor. The cinnamon was not very noticeable, so I may throw in another stick for that.
I'll also be bottling the Bourbon Cask Porter tonight - I can't wait to see how that tastes after 3 weeks in the secondary with oak and some bourbon all blending together...
Well, I just finished racking this to the secondary. As I mentioned in my post above, I had added all of the maple syrup at the beginning of the process (rather than doing half and half) and this seems to be working really well. The cinnamon was extremely light - almost non-existent, so I decided to add another stick and rack over it. And although there was a good maple syrup presence in the beer, I decided to add just a little bit more (about 5oz more) as the beer is still fermenting (a full 12 days after brewing).
What I wasn't expecting is what happened after I racked to the secondary. I moved the carboy to the pantry and secured the double bubble airlock and immediately had airlock activity - to the tune of about one bubble every 2-3 seconds. No krausen, but definite airlock activity.
I'm liking how this porter is turning out and can't wait for the three weeks or so that I'll condition them (actually probably 4 full weeks before I open one).
The same thing happened when I moved it to the secondary. I had activity for 3 or 4 days. I didn't get as much maple flavor as a I was hoping. It's pretty robust right now and I hope it will mellow out as it ages.
UPDATE: Today marks the 12th day in the secondary. I was planning to bottle on Wednesday, so I thought I would take a gravity reading and give it a taste today. My gravity reading was at 1.014, which is right on after adding the other 8 oz. of syrup. I had absolutely no taste of maple in the brew OR cinnamon, which I am pretty sad about.
My taste test showed this one to be a bit dry with a bite. I think I will go ahead an bottle this on Wednesday as planned.
Not sure about abv, but OG was 1.049 and FG is 1.014
Brew Rob,
According to my calculations you have 4.6% abv. 1.049 - 1.014 = .035 x 105 = 3.675% abw x 1.25= 4.59% abv.
I think if you try bottling with maple syrup (8 ozs.) you'll find that maple flavor you're looking for. Never actually done this but I've seen it in several other recipes.
Update: Bottled today. I only had 1//2 cups of priming sugar, so I used that and made the rest up with DME.
Tastes test showed the same as before - no maple flavor and no cinnamon flavor. But, it still tastes good!
On a side note: I don't know much about maple syrup, but I heard that the better the quality, the milder the taste of syrup. I bought a top quality organic syrup that didn't have much taste to begin with, so I guess that makes sense. Anyone else experience this?
You are absolutely correct about that. Top grade i.e. Fancy has a very light and delicate flavor. As you get closer to medium amber and dark amber and grade B, you get more robust flavors. I used Dark Amber in mine, but I haven't tasted it in a couple of weeks. I did when I moved it to the secondary a couple of weeks ago, and I was disappointed that there wasn't more maple flavor. We'll see how it ages....