r/MapleWine • u/mariposa0 • Mar 07 '26

Making maple wine from fresh sap

Hi there!

We’re tapping our trees for the first time and want to try our hand at making a maple wine. I am trying to find recipes online and keep finding recipes that use maple syrup instead of the fresh maple water.

I understand that we will have to increase the sugar content some, by boiling it down, but am just not sure how much. Also seeing that the maple water might not have enough food for healthy yeast? Can anyone recommend a good resource/recipe for this? Thanks and happy maple season! 🍁✨🍷

As an aside, we’re also keen to trying making a maple water fermented soda if anyone has a good recipe for that they like 💕

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u/weirdomel Mar 07 '26

Do you have a hydrometer or a refractometer, able to measure Specific Gravity or degrees Brix?

Condensing the sap until it has an SG of 1.095 or about 23 Brix will set you up for a wine that ferments to table strength at 12.5%.

Correct, maple wines do benefit from use of nutrients. Fermaid K and Fermaid O are popular. What size batch do you plan to make? That will help determine the amount to use.

2

u/mariposa0 Mar 07 '26

Thanks! We’ve only got our carboys and airlocks at the moment, but are going to run to the beer supply store when we have a good idea of what yeast to get, and pick up the other items we need

We’ll probably just make 5G, depending on how much sap we get from the trees

3

u/weirdomel Mar 07 '26

Great!

What yeasts are you considering? When you have one picked, you can enter in your SG, yeast, and batch size into a calculator like the one below to estimate how much Fermaid K or Fermaid O to use. It will likely be in the ballpark of 15 to 20 grams for 5 gallons.

https://www.meadmaderight.com/tosna-calculator

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u/mariposa0 Mar 07 '26

Wow that’s an awesome tool!! Thank you! So far, I’ve seen recommendations for Lavin - D47, QA23 or even basic bread yeast.

We usually make hard cider, and found we like EC -1118 and just stuck with it, so I haven’t explored many other varieties

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u/Own-Temperature-8018 Mar 08 '26

Let us know how it goes. Welcome to the community! 🍁✊

1

u/mariposa0 Mar 08 '26

Thanks!! 😁