How do you get maple flavor in beer? Beers made from tree sap offer foraged flavors to the diligent home brewer.
Andy Conrad’s family started making maple syrup from their sugar maple grove near Minerva, Ohio, over a century ago. Andy got involved when his father revived the operation in the 1990s, and today, his young daughter is the sixth generation of the family to walk the grove and harvest the sweet sap that flows from its trees each spring.
But here’s a twist: The sap no longer gets boiled down to maple syrup. It’s instead brewed into beer.
Andy and his wife, Amanda, are the founders of Sandy Springs Brewing Company, a small brewpub that serves as a gathering place for their charming small town. Every year they’re able, the Conrads tap the family sugar bush for sap they use to brew a beer called Happy Sappy. And while brewing craft beer with a bit of maple syrup is more common than you might think, it’s rare to find a brewery replacing water 100 percent with sap as the Conrads do.
Happy Sappy requires a lot of hard work, but for Conrad, its link to family makes the results worth it. “I have a deep connection with the farm,” he says. “I can almost feel my ancestors out there when we go out to gather the sap.”
Brewing with sap doesn’t need to be confined to commercial operations. Sap-brewing is a fantastic way for homebrewers to make unique beers using ingredients that reflect their growing location. Here’s a bit of inspiration to get you started.
The Essence of Beers Made with Tree Sap
Tree sap is mostly water, forming a solution that’s made to carry nutrients all the way up the tree. Yet, sap’s makeup includes far more than water – and a lot more complexity.
Sugar
Sap’s most notable ingredient for the homebrewer is sugar; however, we’re not talking amounts that preclude a ton of fermentable potential here. Sap contains about 2 percent sugar by volume, which equates to an original gravity of about 1.008 – only slightly denser than water – but still enough to boost the strength of your beer by as much as 1 percent alcohol by volume (ABV). That sugar is mostly in the form of sucrose, which brewing yeast will enzymatically convert into glucose and fructose before it breaches the cell membrane to metabolize.
Conrad recommends adding plenty of yeast nutrient to make sure your yeast is fully healthy and oxygenating a bit more than normal.
Minerals
Sap carries nutrients to a tree’s extremities, including lots of minerals. Studies show calcium and potassium are the most common minerals in maple sap, with trace amounts of copper, phosphorus, magnesium, zinc, and manganese also present. The exact mineral composition of the sap will vary based on location, local climate, soil type, and other factors – the very essence of terror– so understanding the flavor contribution of your local sap might take a bit of trial and error.
Acidity
Tree sap’s pH will also vary by location and can exhibit a wide range, anywhere from 3.9 to 7.9. At Sandy Springs, Conrad says his mash pH when brewing with maple sap comes out to a “perfect” 5.2.
Get Maple Flavor in Beer
Travel 580 miles west of the Conrads and you can visit another small brewery serving sappy sips in the southern Illinois town of Ava. Marika Josephson and Aaron Kleidon own Scratch Brewing Company, tucked into the woods outside of Shawnee National Forest. They use ingredients foraged from forests and fields to build flavor profiles into their beers centered around a connection to the land and seasons. The pair branches out from using maple alone by using sap from river birch and walnut.
The flavor contributions of sap can be relatively subtle. Syrup is concentrated 20 to 40 times from the original sap, after all. And so while brewers using straight sap do report a flavor note of each particular species, it’s easily overwhelmed by other flavors in the beer. Josephson and Kleidon complement subtle sappiness with foraged flavors. Scratch often introduces drinkers to ingredients many have never heard of, let alone have thought to imbibe: fig leaves, sweet clover, and elecampane. The beer called “49,” for instance, is brewed with 49 different leaves, roots, barks, fruits, and fungi.
Josephson likes to add other parts of the tree to tell the entire story of that particular species. She includes toasted maple bark in a maple-based brew. Birch is tannic, adding a bit of bitterness, so she plays off that. But walnut is her favorite flavor to work with. “The walnut beer really did remind me of nocino,” she says, referring to the dark-brown Italian liqueur made from unripe walnuts. “It smells like freshly sliced green walnuts cooked down into a liquor. It’s not that pungent, but you get that essence.”
No matter the source, the most notable flavor to come from sap is typically minerality. Because of this, Josephson recommends brewing beer styles with darker malts better able to wrestle with the earthiness of sap.
“Because the sugar ferments out, you’re left with those minerals, and you can end up with the metallic flavor you sometimes get if you add too much sugar to a homebrewed beer,” she explains. In a pale beer, these flavors have nowhere to hide and can overpower the pale malt flavors. Darker beer styles will instead impart richer flavors, ranging from toasty bread to roasty chocolate and coffee that can work harmoniously with minerality. “It’s like what you might get from a minerally or granitic wine.”
The Harvest Window
Knowing when to harvest tree sap requires paying attention to the weather. The first run of the sap will vary based on latitude and regional weather patterns. In the Midwest, the first run generally begins in February.
“You’re looking for a deep freeze-and-thaw cycle,” says Andy Conrad. “You want it below 30 degrees at night, but then 40 to 50 degrees during the day.”
After you’ve tapped a tree and affixed a bucket for the sap to run into, be diligent about checking on it. Josephson has seen a 5-gallon bucket overflow in just 24 hours. Don’t tap the same tree for more than three years, and never use any sap that has an off odor or has turned brown. Both Josephson and Andy Conrad say to use the sap as quickly as possible, the same day it’s harvested or within no more than 24 hours. Otherwise, it can begin to spontaneously ferment and potentially spoil.
The exact character of the sap will likely change across the window of the run (which can last into April), and you might find it interesting to brew beers with sap from opposite ends of this window to get a sense for seasonal shifts. There’s plenty to learn about brewing with tree sap. Experiment, have fun, and be open to what the trees – and the beers – have to teach you.
“For us, because we brew with the seasons, it’s something we look forward to, to have this relationship with the trees in different ways in winter than in summer,” says Josephson. “This is one of those special winter things the Earth is still giving us during the deadest part of the year.”
David Nilsen is an award-winning member of the North American Guild of Beer Writers who covers food and travel, with particular emphases on craft beer and chocolate. Connect with him at www.DavidNilsenBeer.com.
Originally published in the March/ April 2025 issue of Grit magazine and regularly vetted for accuracy.
