At the end of winter, when the nights freeze but days warm up a bit, sugar maple trees begin to wake up in preparation for spring. Farmers tap the trees, boiling down their sap for maple syrup. It’s a tradition that’s lasted generations and an industry that’s estimated to be worth more than $1.5 billion, with hundreds of thousands of gallons in production each year.
When it comes to making maple syrup, timing and temperature are just about everything. During winter, sugar maples go dormant just as other deciduous trees do. This helps the trees conserve their energy during the coldest, darkest part of the year.
When the season’s just right, warming daytime temperatures signal to the trees that springtime is near, and their sap begins to flow. The rhythmic daily temperature shifts cause pressure changes that encourage sap flow. This sap provides energy for springtime growth and budding green leaves. You can also tap the trees and take some of that goodness for yourself.
Traditionally, farmers tap the trees with metal spigots that allow the sap to drip into covered buckets. The sap itself is barely sweet and has more water than anything else, but with time and heat, maple water is transformed into syrup and sugar. Many homesteaders and small-scale producers still produce maple syrup in family-owned sugar shacks. Fitted with wood-burning stoves and evaporating pans, maple sap is progressively reduced to a fine syrup, losing as much as 90 percent of its original water content.
While maple sap is clear, the syrup that comes from this slow evaporation process can vary in color from a delicate clear amber to an opaque brown that borders on black. The color of the syrup corresponds well with its flavor, with the darkest syrup tasting the most intense.
Syrup can be reduced even further until it crystallizes to form sugar granules. The resulting maple sugar keeps indefinitely and has an intense sweetness with woodsy, mineral-like notes.
Maple sugaring is a long tradition of the Ojibwe people. Their traditional tribal lands, which extend from the northern Midwest states up to parts of southern Canada, overlap with the natural range of sugar maple trees. They and other indigenous peoples would prepare maple sugar in the springtime by reducing the sap to syrup and the syrup to hunks of brown crystalized sugar. Sugar is easier to transport than sap because it’s a dry good, and indigenous people often used it as a source of energy and to flavor fish, meat, berries, and other foods.
Modern maple sugar production differs very little from traditional production. With a few improvements in efficiency, the principles remain the same: Tap the trees, reduce the sap to syrup, and bottle. Only now, large-scale producers often use tubing to transport the sap from the taps to holding tanks rather than carrying buckets from the woods to the sugar shacks by hand. Other improvements in evaporation and filtering techniques can improve the efficiency of production and the clarity and quality of the final product.
Regardless of improved production efficiency, it’s a labor-intensive process that accounts for maple’s relatively high cost compared with highly processed and refined sweeteners such as refined white sugar. Yet with such a rich flavor and deep history, it’s worth it, and nothing’s quite as good as real maple syrup on homemade pancakes.
