Next step?

chemosh6969 · Sep 7, 2005

I'm new to this as my first experience to brewing anything was a guide to making "hobo jug wine".

I've now moved on to mead and am making a maple mead. I started this batch at the end of July, racket it about a week and a half after that, and it is now at about a bubble every 30 seconds or so.

What would be the ideal next step? With hobo jug wine I'd be putting it into bottles now but I'm trying to make something good with this.

Any help is appreciated.

jab · Sep 7, 2005

We really need you recipe at a minimum to be of any help. The steps you took, any readings then and now, other things like temperature would also be helpful.

The only thing I can tell you is that (unless it is as dry as you want it) at 30 seconds/blip I would just wait. It is still going fairly well.

Norskersword · Sep 7, 2005

Did you add yeast nutrient? It probably shouldn't be still bubbling right now.

Brewbear · Sep 8, 2005

Welcome to the forums ;D
In order for any of us to be able to give you any worthwile suggestions, we would need the "ghory" details. As Jab mentioned, post the recipe and the subsequent steps you took. As a sidenote, meads takes quite a bit longer to ferment and at 1 blip every 30 sec, depending on your ambiant temperature (specially low ones) you might still be looking at a "primary" fermentation of sorts.

Hope it helps,
Ted

WRATHWILDE · Sep 8, 2005

Chemosh6969,

My Honey Maple Mead took forever, it was still fermenting after several months. No Nutrients added. I'd let it go a while longer as jab suggests. Wait till it clears, rack again... being careful not to transfer any of the sediment, bulk age (minimum of 6 months), then bottle.

Wrathwilde

chemosh6969 · Sep 8, 2005

I just went with 6 gallons of pure maple mead. I used 8.5 quarts of maple and no nutrients added.

The room temp is around the lower to upper 70's.

I take it that it will take a few months to clear, am I correct?

One more question, what is bulk aging exactly?

byathread · Sep 8, 2005

Welcome Chemosh!

So no honey, just maple syrup? Did you take a gravity reading?

According to the mead calculator, a total volume of 6 gallons with only 8.5 quarts of maple syrup would end up with a starting gravity of 1.068 or about 9% PA. It will ferment to dryness. What yeast did you use?

BTW, bulk aging refers to aging the mead in the carboy as opposed to aging it in the bottles. Most people do a combination of both.

Kirk

briankettering · Sep 8, 2005

If there is no honey, wouldn't that make this batch a maple wine? ???

Brian K

WRATHWILDE · Sep 8, 2005

There has been some discussion about what a pure maple fermentation would be. Would we really want to annoy the fermenters of Maple Syrup by calling it Maple Wine since there is no juice in the fermentation? I know a number of us here cringe at having to use Honey Wine to describe mead. I vote for Acerllyn for a straight Maple fermentation, llyn from the welsh for liquor. It looks like Acerglyn is becoming accepted for a Honey Maple Mead.

Maple syrup is made from the sap of one or more of these trees:
Sugar maple (Acer saccharum)
Black maple (Acer nigrum)
Red maple (Acer rubrum)
Silver Maple (Acer saccharinum)

Wrathwilde

briankettering · Sep 8, 2005

I have made a number of fine fruit wines including lemon, strawberry, elderberry, and apricot. None of them contain any grapes.

Brian K

Dmntd · Sep 8, 2005

Wine; A liquor or beverage prepared from the juice of any fruit or plant by a process similar to that for grape wine; as, currant wine; gooseberry wine; palm wine. 1913 Webster -

By this definition, Maple "Wine" is the correct term.

Anthony

WRATHWILDE · Sep 8, 2005

Would boiled down sap really be considered a juice? Since Juice is defined as the liquid obtained from FRUITS & VEGETABLES, in that sense Maple Syrup doesn't qualify as a juice.

juice |jo?s| noun
The liquid obtained from or present in fruit or vegetables. • a drink made from such a liquid : a carton of orange juice.

Wrathwilde

Dmntd · Sep 8, 2005

In a word, YES. Sap is the juice of any tree.

When fruit juice is consentrated and frozen, is it no longer juice?

Natural syrup is a thick and viscid liquid made from the juice of fruits and plants etc. which have been reduced by means of boiling. Rehydrated they are juice again.

Virtually any sugary plant sap can be processed into wine.

Take palm wine as an example. The sap of the palm is collected, after which it is not heated but allowed to ferment naturaly. Within days of its being collected it will start to ferment, in as little as an hour or two it can reach 4% abv, if allowed to ferment for more then a day it will become vinegar.

Anthony

Dmntd · Sep 8, 2005

There's a recipe for maple wine here - http://winemaking.jackkeller.net/request132.asp -

Anthony

chemosh6969 · Sep 9, 2005

Dmntd said:
In a word, YES. Sap is the juice of any tree.

When fruit juice is consentrated and frozen, is it no longer juice?

Natural syrup is a thick and viscid liquid made from the juice of fruits and plants etc. which have been reduced by means of boiling. Rehydrated they are juice again.

Virtually any sugary plant sap can be processed into wine.

Take palm wine as an example. The sap of the palm is collected, after which it is not heated but allowed to ferment naturaly. Within days of its being collected it will start to ferment, in as little as an hour or two it can reach 4% abv, if allowed to ferment for more then a day it will become vinegar.

Anthony

I'm going to have to disagree sine a tree is neither a fruit or a vegetable. Frozen concentrate is considered juice since the liquid was obtained from a fruit or vegetable.

byathread · Sep 9, 2005

Tastes great! Less filling!

What else really matters??

Dmntd · Sep 9, 2005

Tree, is it an; Animal, Mineral or Vegetable?

Maple, Birch, coconut palm, oil palm, wild date palm, nipa palm, raphia palm and kithul palm are the tree's most often tapped for making syrup & wine.

A couple Reference's on wine made from tree sap.

http://www.gi.alaska.edu/ScienceForum/ASF4/467.html

http://ausis.gf.vu.lt/eka/food/drinks.html

http://www.crfg.org/pubs/ff/edible-palms.html

http://www.honeycreek.us/wine99.html

http://www.abooks.com/roberts/winerecipes.html

http://winemaking.jackkeller.net

Many of the recipe's for wine made from the sap of plants found on the internet refer to these 2 books by the same author.

Wines From the Wilds ~ Krause Steven A ~ 0811729869 ~ Paperback

Drinks from the Wilds ~ Krause Steven A ~ 0811727335 ~ Paperback

Anthony

chemosh6969 · Jul 8, 2010

So after 5 years I've cracked open a bottle for myself at a party I went to for the UFC fight last weekend. I've handed out a few bottles as gifts previously but never tasted the actual product. One person that got a bottle liked it enough to finish it himself that night complete with the nasty hangover the next morning.

It came in a around 21%, it's smooth and has a nice maple taste. Now the guy whose house I brought it over to wants to make some and I want to get back into it now. The last one I've done is Joe's Ancient Orange which is at least 3 years old and hasn't been touched at all.

Chevette Girl · Jul 8, 2010

Wow, I don't have the patience to let my maple meads sit around that long... I've not yet tried straight maple syrup as I'm quite happy with my usual recipe... I bet it's wonderful... the longer I can leave mine alone the better they are

AToE · Jul 8, 2010

So far my straight maple wines (not a mead without honey right) haven't been as good as my maple mead. I think that if it's dry, it needs to be a higher ABV, say 15 or 16% and have some honey in it to give it the impression of being "full/thick/sweet" whilst still being dry. Straight maple at 14% is thin - of course mine is less than a year old, so for all I know it'll turn to solid gold in a few years... I'll post updates in my brewlog as I do tastings, hopefully I can keep the 2 gallons I made going for a few years (I'm not going to bottle the second gallon until there's only 1 bottle of the first gal left, which will be at least a year from now. Then I'm going to bottle and age for at least 6 months and compare the 2 so I can see what differences I can notice in the bulk aged one versus the bottle aged one).

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