Watch The Full, Soothing Evolution Of Sap Becoming Gorgeous Maple Syrup
Chances are you've not experienced the joy of real maple syrup. The rich, amber brown, thick syrup has a wonderfully deep sweet flavor, and a taste that will make you realize what those fake syrups you know and love try so hard—and fail!—to replicate. But getting from maple tree to pancake is more than just sticking a tube through bark to your French Toast.
To learn how it all works, we traveled to Republic Of Vermont, a sugar house in Goshen, VT, run by Ethan West, the establishment's co-founder and lead Sugarmaker. You can watch their full syrup-making process in the video above.
So! Where does maple syrup come from?
Maple syrup starts with maple sap...which comes from maple trees. Sap doesn’t look like anything special and only has a sugar content of two-to-four percent. “If you had a glass of it, it’d look clear,” says West, and it doesn't taste great either. “I don’t taste any maple flavor at all in sap; it has an earthy hint of sweetness to the flavor,” which is just one reason why we don't consume it as is.
How do you get sap?
“We drill a small hole in the live wood of the tree and intercept a small percentage of a tree’s sap,” says West. He does this by connecting a vacuum pump to the hole and sucking sap out, but some sugarmakers still use the technique of drilling a hole, inserting a metal or plastic “spout” and hanging a bucket beneath it to catch the sap as it drips out the tap.
When can you get sap? Does it have to be while it's cold out?
According to the University of Vermont, sap flows “when temperatures alternate between freezing and thawing.” This happens as trees prepare for spring budding and draw water and nutrients up from their roots to their branches, but that window can be very small—and global warming is making it even smaller. “We hope to start in late February,” says West. Between then and late March is the full syrup-making season.
In that time, you’re hoping to collect a LOT of sap. While West says he looks for trees to produce eight-to-10 gallons of sap over a season, that often only converts to one pint of syrup! With more than 7,000 trees tapped, though, West is able to make thousands of gallons of syrup a year.
How do you turn syrup into sap?
Sugarmakers need to get the aforementioned sugar sap up to over 66 percent sugar for it to be considered syrup. To do this, according to UVM, they must boil it: “There is only one way to make syrup and that is to boil the sap. Boiling concentrates the sugar in the sap through evaporation and it also provides heat for complex chemical reactions between flavor and color precursors.”
So sugarmakers use evaporators. These large devices use intense heat to boil off the sap by moving it through shallow “pans.” Evaporators can create heat with wood, oil, solar, or in West’s case, woodchips.
To make the process a bit easier, many sugarmakers, including West, use a Reverse Osmosis (RO) Machine that forces some of the water out of the sap (so it gets up to 15 percent sugar) before it heads to the evaporator, so that the final boil requires less energy.
When the syrup reaches the correct sugar content, West and other sugarmakers draw it out of the evaporator, run it through a filter to remove any impurities, and then bottle it to reach your table.
Can I make syrup?!
You can make syrup even if you only have a few maple trees! “It's especially fun with kids,” says West. You’ll need to “tap” your trees right before the freeze thaw cycle starts (in early to mid February), and then insert a plastic or metal tap, which you can find online. Hang a bucket beneath it and wait for the sap to run.
Collect your sap and put it in a metal buffet trays above a high heat flame, like a turkey boiler, explains West, just be sure to do it outside, as all the water that comes out of sap could peel your wallpaper.
While you might not have a hightech “hydrometer” to test the sugar content of syrup, West notes many “old-timers” rely on a different method: Dip a spoon into your syrup then pull it straight out. “When it starts to ‘sheet’ off instead of dripping, it's thick enough to call syrup.”
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