Home Distiller

I was just wondering if you fermented the sap from a maple tree and distilled it with a pot still would that make some kind of rum?

I may be able to get a few buckets of sap in the spring if the winter ever ends.

I don't think that maple sap will have all that much sugar in it (i.e. be useful as a straight wash) -- I know that maple syrup brandy is made in Canada, and it sounds really nice. But that involves boiling the sap to make a syrup (thus concentrating it).

It'd be interesting to find out the SG of fresh maple sap... I've thought about making same from Lithuanian maples (which are lower in sugar than candadian sugar maples), but I've just been too lazy to drill holes into my maples... (I'm a softy).

Aidas

Considering how it takes about 40 gallons of maple sap to get 1 gallon of maple syrup, the sugar content is not all that high... I haven't made maple syrup in 30+ years but I can still remember the diluted sweet taste as well as the smell of the steam that the process produced... Mmmm...

rad14701 wrote:Considering how it takes about 40 gallons of maple sap to get 1 gallon of maple syrup, the sugar content is not all that high... I haven't made maple syrup in 30+ years but I can still remember the diluted sweet taste as well as the smell of the steam that the process produced... Mmmm...

Exactly.

Aidas

so, boil the sap down to about 1.080 SG and toss in some nutrients, acid and yeast. Will probably be quite good.

I defiantly want to know how this one turns out mmmmm hot buttered shine for my pancakes !

I tapped one of my trees last spring. It put out 2.5% sugar by weight. it took 10 gallons to make one gallon at 1.080. It turned light brown like weak tea. Fermented well but there was little to no taste. The maple was very subtle. If I were to do this again I would wait until the sap was buddy later in the spring to get more flavor.

Heard tell of folks using maple sap and birch sap in place of water to make beer. Never tried it personally.

Cooking down maple sap into syrup just so you can ferment and distill it kinda sounds like too much work for the end result... It takes far more heat to get the syrup than it will to distill... If I was going to go to the effort of making syrup again I sure wouldn't waste those efforts making it into hooch, I'd fix me some pancakes and slather 'em up... Sure would beat the 0% maple syrup you get in the stores these days...

ya i thank that's the way they get real" birch beer"

If I were in the business of making "maple brandy", I'd want to use something like a reverse osmosis unit rather than trying to boil the sap up to 1.080. Not only that, you could use the water you get off of it to dilute your finished spirit, knowing that it's near mineral and taste free.

Oh well, it's probably little more work than malting your own grains four pounds at a time, drying it, cracking it yourself, and mashing it like I do and still get a decent yield.

anybody know how much pure alcohol could be made from maple/birch sap?
I was thinking of reverse osmosis to up the sugar concentration to a production level, but after that my alcohol knowledge only comes from drinking it.

kmadden wrote:anybody know how much pure alcohol could be made from maple/birch sap?
I was thinking of reverse osmosis to up the sugar concentration to a production level, but after that my alcohol knowledge only comes from drinking it.

The sugar content is just too low to make the venture worthwhile, in my opinion... Any tree sap that is thin enough to flow through a tree, whether Maple, Birch, or otherwise, doesn't have enough sugar...