This is a non-malt-based beer in an older sense of the word: one that simply uses beer expansively to refer to any non-distilled fermented beverage. This is based roughly on several recipes on page 251 of Stephen Buhner's Sacred Herbal and Healing Beers. in honor of an excellent Monty Python skit, we're going call this Maple-Spruce Beer for now.

Ingredients in this batch

Sanitized everything, then poured the maple syrup in, then the spruce extract. Poured in the Fermax and Fermaid K. Poured in water to total about a gallon in the carboy. Agitated for five minutes to oxygenate. Pulled off enough to take a hydrometer reading, leaving very close to exactly a gallon left (I'm getting good at eyeballing that). Pulled a few fluid ounces of fermenting mead from Xenia's batch 066, then popped in a fermentation lock and filled it to the line with vodka. Set the carboy on a shelf to ferment.

Bottled on 19 June 2017. Had all of the beer in bottles before I remembered that I'd meant to carbonate it. Fretted about it, worried about oxygenation, and decided to go ahead and try to put an addition of sugar into each bottle rather than racking back into a container, mixing in sugar, and then then rebottling, even though it would have been smarter to have mixed in priming sugar before transferring into bottles. Added a half-teaspoon of corn sugar to the top of each bottle at bottling, on the theory that under-sugaring (the traditional advice for sugar-in-each-bottle is one teaspoon per bottle) will hopefully avoid the problem of slightly-over-sugared-beer-that-turns-into-a-bottle-bomb for the bottles at the high end of carbonation. We'll see. Still, I wish I'd remembered before bottling.

Brew date: 16 May 2017.
Original gravity: 1.087.
Bottling date: 19 June 2017
Final gravity: 0.997.
Estimated ABV: Approx. 12¼%.

Yield:

  • 9 x 12 oz. bottles
  • a 10 oz. cup of beer, including that recovered from the hydrometer tube after measurement.

Total: About 118 fl. oz., or 92% of a gallon

Observations

  • 2017-05-17T14:22: There's already some sluggish carbon dioxide production in the carboy.
  • 2017-05-18T16:59: There's real bubbling going on in the carboy.
  • 2017-06-08: Finally performed the addition of all outstanding nutrients. Yeesh.
  • 2017-06-19: Bottled, yielding 92% of a gallon at a bit over 12% ABV. Added ½ tsp. corn sugar to each bottle for priming.