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In search of maple syrup

Jumpinbare said:
My father grew up in Cairo, Georgia. Cairo is known for cane syrup. My father took us kids to see (and taste) the cane juice being rendered for syrup. We got to taste the raw cane juice and two or three stages of the boiling. This was done in an open air pole barn. Basically just a roof to keep rain out. No walls
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That's funny - I always keep a jar of Cairo in the lab because I feed it to the mushrooms. But I keep taking hits off the bottle because it tastes so good. I know it's made for people, so it's OK.
 
Sherlock77 said:
I don't think we can even make maple syrup here in western Canada, but it's still a very popular food product here...

On another note, possibly the strangest theft of all time :p related to the topic on hand, this isn't fake news

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Canadian_Maple_Syrup_Heist
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All the Canada near me is crawling with sugar maples. I'm on the east side - slightly colder than hear, but still perfect for maples.

Did you ever hear the tale of the great molasses flood of 1919, Boston?

An enormous tank filled with molasses ruptured, there was a massive molasses tidal wave that killed 21 people.

True story. Look it up. :)
 
Outdated said:
Golden Syrup's pretty big in Australia too, we have a huge sugar cane industry. Golden syrup used to get advertised as "The taste of the sunshine in Queensland". I prefer it to any other syrup or honey.
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Not too far from me is a distillery that makes agricole rum (i.e. from cane juice, not molasses.) They’ve recently brought out a blend of 80% from cane honey (from after the first boil for sugar-making, similar to golden syrup) and 20% juice, aged in used red wine barrels. Very nice.
 
I used to live in Upstate New York. We had five mature maple trees. The sap boiled down into roughly 12 gallons of syrup. It was thick, very dark and maple. It is disappointing that we can only buy pale maple syrup here.
 
WhitewaterWoman said:
I used to live in Upstate New York. We had five mature maple trees. The sap boiled down into roughly 12 gallons of syrup. It was thick, very dark and maple. It is disappointing that we can only buy pale maple syrup here.
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Wow - 5 trees gave you 12 gallons!

The few trees I plan to tap should give me enough for my needs then.
 
TBRS1 said:
Wow - 5 trees gave you 12 gallons!

The few trees I plan to tap should give me enough for my needs then.
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That’s why I mentioned it. These were large mature trees. As I recall, the buckets were 2 gallons and we dumped them every day. As someone else pointed out, the sap spoils quickly, ferments actually.

We didn‘t boil in batches. We had a fire in a barrel cut in half longitudinally and a sugaring pan set on that. We just kept boiling and dumping in fresh sap. That’s why it was so dark and tasty.
 
Technically, it's early, but temps are up, and it looks like I have go set taps tomorrow!
 
Technically has nothing to do with the sap flowing. :)

It could be milder and/or shorter winters are causing the sap to rise early.

The Carolina jessamine, the first spring flower here, is blooming about a week earlier than “normal.”
 
Update:

So far I've only collected about 2 gallons of tree juice, which I've just boiled down in the house.

The sap is now flowing faster though.

Also, I made an embarrassing rookie mistake...

You know how easy it is to tell a maple from an oak by looking at the leaves? Well, turns out that when the trees are all standing around naked, maples and oaks look a lot alike.

I tapped two maples and an oak.

Tapping an oak is like trying to milk a lizard. It just ain't gonna happen.
 
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