I see my neighbour Bert at work with all the maple trees along the street as maple syrup season has officially arrived. I don’t know how many cans Bert has, but the number must be great as I see them hanging from just about every tree as I drive by.
Maple syrup, as any proper Canadian could tell you, is made from the sap of sugar maple trees. Harnessing and harvesting can be a real process, and that’s why it’s better that guys like Bert are doing it and not me.
In late winter or early spring, when the temperatures begin to rise above freezing during the day and drop below freezing at night, sugar maple trees are tapped by drilling a hole in the tree trunk and inserting a spout. The sap then flows out of the spout and into a collection container. The sap is collected from the trees in buckets or through a system of gravity tubing that allows the sap to flow downhill from the trees to a collection tank.
The sap is then boiled down in a large, flat-bottomed pan called an evaporator. As the water in the sap evaporates, the sugar concentration increases, a process that can take several hours. You have to keep a rather close eye on things as you don’t want the stuff to boil over or burn. Once the sap is boiled down to the desired sugar concentration, it is filtered to remove any impurities or sediment.
The final step is to bottle the syrup while it is still hot and sterile. The syrup is typically graded based on its colour and flavour, with lighter grades having a more delicate flavour and darker grades having a stronger, more robust flavour.
How much syrup is produced depends upon a whole bunch of things like weather, number of trees, number of cans, and how much work a person wants to dedicate to the task. But once done, the work results in the closest thing to liquid gold on the planet.
Way to go, Bert.
NEWSMAGRENFREW 