Using Maple Sap as your water source!

Once again Dane from Pearl Street Brewery in Lacrosse, WI came through with an intriguing suggestion for a fun seasonal beer utilizing a unique water source...Maple Sap. Maple sap is 98-99% water, and to make syrup, you have to collect something like 40 gallons of sap to make 1 gallon of Maple syrup. I'm not going to make syrup because that would be way too much work. What I am going to do is collect 9 gallons of sap to use as my brew water for my next beer. Luckily, I have a Silver Maple in my backyard that is current weeping sap from all of it's orifices. So, I tapped my tree and am currently collecting this sweet nectar. Over the past 16 hours I've already collected 2 gallons so I'm thinking it'll take about 3 days to get the 8-9 gallons of water that I'll need to make a 5 gallon batch of beer! The idea is that the sugar in the sap will get fermented out almost completely increasing the alcohol content slightly. I'm not expecting the beer to taste too much like maple, but it should leave a slight woody flavor to the beer. This woody flavor comes from minerals and proteins in the sap. Commercial syrup producers typically filter these minerals out from their sap to make their syrup more pure before they hit the shelves. I haven't decided on what kind of beer I'm going to make for it yet. I think that it would be great in an America Brown Ale (which is what Dane suggested) and would complement that style of beer and have a nice subtle woody flavor, but, I'm also thinking about making a cream ale so that the woodiness is really apparent. I'm considering making the same exact recipe I did for my Lone Wolf Cream ale so that I have something to compare it to. Can't wait to get my sap collected and ready for brewing. In the mean time, I need to bottle my Lone Wolf Cream Ale for the impending golf season, and also cook up a batch of Surly Furious, a kit I got from Midwest Brew Supply. Lots going on in the brew house this week!

I found out a lot of good information here...
http://forum.northernbrewer.com/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=69797
and here...
http://www.hyzercreek.com/maple.htm

Peace,

~N