Smoked Maple Brown Ale

“Kick Save, and a Beauty…”

by Scott R. Russell 

I had a fairly athletic upbringing. All of my male relatives were sports fans, and I can’t remember ever not being one myself. My great-grandmother would read me the sports pages when I was very young, and my grandmother was a huge hockey fan. I went to Red Sox baseball games starting at the age of 4 or 5, and family gatherings frequently revolved around watching football, basketball, baseball games, golf tournaments, and so forth.

Of course we all played sports, too. No summer cookout was complete without a whiffle-ball game, fall gatherings included touch football, and there was always a golf outing on the mornings of Memorial Day and the Fourth of July. But, no matter how I tried, I just couldn’t ice skate. I blame it on weak ankles, the kind that flop over sideways after about five minutes propped up on thin metal blades. I always ended up with exhausted and painful feet. My great invention and contribution to mankind was always going to be skates with a second blade set at a 90° angle to the main blade, facing outward, like the outrigger canoes on “Hawaii 5-0.”

I loved hockey, still do. Thursday night was hockey night in our house, because that was the night Mom was at choir rehearsal. My dad and I (my brother and sister were too young to stay up that late!) would turn on Channel 38 and watch the Bruins together every Thursday. Bobby Orr, Phil Esposito, Bucyk, Hodge, MacKenzie…heroes of a generation.

So when the guys in the neighborhood would gather at the local pond to play hockey, I was the proverbial Last Kid Picked. And often, because I couldn’t skate, I’d get stuck playing goalie. No mask, no gloves, no big wide goaltender’s stick, just skinny little me, a regular hockey stick, and if I was lucky, mittens that were not soaking wet.

My epiphany came one gloomy afternoon when I saved a game by accident. With time running out, a long booming shot came down the ice at me and I fell. But I fell with my legs out in the direction of the flying puck and knocked it aside to a teammate, and we won. The kid doing the play-by-play on the sideline (there was always someone doing play-by-play on the sideline…) yelled out, imitating the TV announcer, “Kick save, and a beauty…” and, well, my teammates didn’t mob me, but they didn’t give me the traditional whitewashing either…

This was the voice I heard in my mind a couple of winters ago, when I almost burned down my house, and worse, almost ruined a batch of beer. It was sugaring season, and I had been boiling maple sap on the porch for hours. I had reduced 60 or 70 gallons of sap down to about a gallon and a half of thick amber sweet glue. And then I forgot about it, got doing something else inside, and left it still boiling. I smelled burnt sugar, smoke, and in a panic ran out to the porch to find my pan now filled with almost solid, burnt maple toffee. A few more minutes, and I bet it would have burst into flames.

I did the logical thing, what you all would have done in my place, right? I turned off the heat and poured water into the pan, to reconstitute the syrup. But boy did it taste burnt. No longer fit for human consumption. Not on pancakes, at least. But not wanting to waste it — after all, there were 70 gallons of sap and five or six pounds of propane invested in it — I concocted a recipe for an old ale, which would use the burnt syrup instead of molasses or treacle. It is now three years old, and the burnt sugar and smoky maple are wonderful.

Now, I don’t want to encourage anyone to go out and evaporate 70 gallons of fresh maple sap, and then burn it, to duplicate my brewing version of a“kick save.” Instead, I offer a recipe for a stronger-than-average brown ale, with a small amount of smoked grain and some maple, to give you an idea of what it might have been…

Kick Save Smoked Maple Brown Ale
(5 gallons/19 L, partial mash)
OG = 1.068  FG = 1.015
IBU = 22  SRM = 26  ABV = 7.4%

Ingredients
4 lbs. (1.8 kg) pale malt
1 lb. (0.45 kg) brown malt
0.5 lb. (0.23 kg) dark crystal malt (90° L)
0.25 lb. (113 g) chocolate malt
2 oz. (57 g) German rauchmalt (beechwood smoked malt)
3 lbs. (1.4 kg) amber dried malt extract
1 qt. (1 L) pure maple syrup
4 AAU Styrian Goldings hops (75 min.) (0.8 oz./23 g at 5% alpha acids)
4 AAU Hallertauer hops (15 min.) (1 oz./28 g at 4% alpha acids)
European ale yeast (Wyeast 1338 or White Labs WLP011)
1/4 cup brown sugar for priming
1/2 cup maple syrup for priming
1/8 cup corn sugar for priming

Step by Step
Heat 2.5 gal. (9.5 gal) water to 164 °F (73 °C). Crack and mix in pale, brown, crystal, chocolate, and smoked malts. Hold at 152 °F (67 °C) for 90 min. Wash the grains with 2.5 gal. (9.5 gal) water at 168 °F (76 °C).

Add to kettle the dry malt and the maple syrup. Total boil is 75 min. Bring to a boil, add the Styrian Goldings hops, boil 60 min. Add Hallertauer hops, boil 15 minutes. Remove from heat, pour into fermenter and top up to 5.25 gal. (20 L) with water. Cool to 68 °F (20 °C), pitch yeast.

Ferment at 65 °F (18 °C) for three weeks, then rack to your secondary. Age cool (50° F/10 °C) for four weeks. Prime with the brown sugar, maple syrup, and corn sugar. Bottle and age three to five weeks.

Notes:
Extract with grains version: Omit pale malt, but steep the brown, crystal, chocolate, and smoked malts in 2.5 gal. (9.5 gal) of water at 150 °F (66 °C). Increase dry malt to 5 lbs. (2.3 kg), proceed from boiling.

All-grain version: Omit the dried malt extract. Increase the pale malt to 9.5 lbs. (4.3 kg), mash together with the specialty grains as above in 4 gal. (15.1 L) water, sparge with 5 gal. (19 L) water. Add maple syrup as above, and proceed from boiling. Plan your boil to reduce volume to 5.25 gallons (20 L), or top up in the kettle as you go along.

About maple: If you have the good fortune to have access to fresh maple sap, substitute it for water (or even boil a few gallons halfway down to get some additional maple flavor). Please use only real maple syrup and not the commercially produced flavored corn syrup!

About smoked grains: If your local supplier does not stock, or can’t at least special-order smoked malts for you, try the mail-order catalogs and online suppliers. If all else fails, it is possible to smoke your own malt, but I don’t recommend it because it is complicated, especially for a small quantity like what you need for this recipe.