Maple Syrup: Liquid Gold

There are many different kinds of trees in the forest, but the sweetest tree in Pennsylvania is the sugar maple.

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The sap from this tree is used to make pure maple syrup. Sugar maple trees are unique to North America and grow naturally only in the northeastern United States adn southeastern Canada. This makes maple syrup a very special product from Pennsylvania forests.

The basic principles of making maple syrup: Sap is collected from trees, and then water is removed, mostly by boiling, to concentrate it into syrup. Nothing is added, and nothing is removed except pure water.

Maple Harvest Season: In early spring each year, maple producers, also called "sugarmakers", throughout Pennsylavania head to their woods for the start of the maple syrup season, which generally lasts from mid-February to early April. Sugarmakers like cold nights (with temperature below freezing) and warm days (with temperatures above freezing) so the sap will flow.

Tapping maple trees: Maple producers drill a small hole into the trunk of the tree. This is called tapping. They inset a small spout to catch the sap in the hole. The traditional method of collecting sap is to hang a bucket on the metal spout. The sap fills the bucket, and every day, or several times a day, someone must empty the sap into a gathering tank on a tractor-drawn wagon.

Tapping does not affect tree health. The maple producers have to wait until the trees are about 10 inches in diameter (20-40 years old) before they can start tapping them. They also limit the number of taps they put in one tree according to the size of the tree, so that it will not be damaged. The small hole drilled into the tree usually heals within one or two years. If the maple trees are taken care of properly, the same tree can be tapped year after year.

The collected sap must be boiled quickly.

Making the syrup - Sap from the sugar maple tree is about 98% water and 2% sugar, other nutrients, and mineral. Maple syrup is 33% water and 67% sugar. It takes 40-50 gallons of sap to make a gallon of pure maple syrup. To make pure maple syrup, the sap needs to be boiled to exaporate most of the water away. In the old days, the sap is boiled over an open pot. The boiling is very vigorous and great quantities of steam are produced.

Nowadays, most of the boiling is done using evaporators, which essentially consist of two or more large, specially designed pans that are filled with the sap.

These pans sit over a fire of burning wood, which heats the sap and causes it to boil. As it boils, some of the water in the sap turns into steam, which rises out of the sugarhouse. As the sap thicken, it becomes sweeter. The syrup is then filtered to take out "sugar sand", which accumulates as the sap boils. After that, the maple syrup is put in a container for sale.

The boiling of the sap takes place in a "sugarhouse", which is a simple building that shelters boiling operations that is usually uninsulated, with a steam vent in the roof, a concrete floor and space for the evaporator, fuel (either wood or oil) to heat the evaporator and sap storage. The sugarhouse is often located at the base of a hillside and accessible by a road. Every sugarhouse will have a large stainless steel chimneys to exhaust the great quantities of steam that are produced from the boiling sap; it is the sight of this steam that lets you know that an evaporator is fired up and the sugarmaker is making syrup.

In a modern sugarhouse you may also see some of the new technology that helps the sugarmaker be more efficient in his syrup production. One of the most interesting pieces of equipment is the reverse osmosis machine. This works like a water purifier in reverse, pushing the sap through a fine membrane to separate pure water from the sugar, and thus concentrate the sap before it is boiled. Reverse osmosis can remove ¾ of the water from sap, which saves the sugarmaker a great deal of time in boiling.

Source:
Maple Syrup - A Taste of Nature, produced by the Information and Communication Technologies in the College of Agricultural Sciences, Penn State University (2000)http://www.vermontmaple.org/maplestory.html