Maple syrup

• 1. Introduction

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  Quebec alone accounts for 72 per cent of the maple syrup produced on Earth. Almost all the rest comes from Canada and the United States, which makes this one of the most geographically lopsided foods in the world. Maple syrup is a sweet syrup made from the sap of maple trees. Nobody builds the sugar in a factory. The tree makes it, and gives it up for only a few weeks each year. This documentary asks how a tree stores and releases that sugar, who first learned to capture it, and how boiling sap became a business with its own laws, labels and rivals. It also asks why a bottle of syrup can be judged by how much light passes through it.

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• 2. Sugar From the Roots

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  In cold climates, maple trees spend the months before winter packing starch into their trunks and roots. Late in winter that starch turns to sugar, and the sugar rises with the sap. This is the window that syrup makers work in.

  Three species do most of the work: the sugar maple, the black maple and the red maple. Their sap carries two to five per cent sugar. Some botanists fold the black maple into the sugar maple as a variety. The red maple has a shorter season, because it buds earlier and the sap's flavour changes.

  A maple is usually first tapped when it is 30 to 40 years old. Each tree can carry between one and three taps, depending on the width of its trunk. An average tree gives 35 to 50 litres of sap in a season, and as much as 12 litres in a single day. That is roughly seven per cent of all its sap. Maples can keep being tapped past the age of 100.

  The sap runs on days when the temperature rises above freezing, and the tapping season lasts four to eight weeks. A few other species are tapped as well. These include the box elder, the silver maple, the bigleaf maple and, in the Southeastern United States, the Florida sugar maple. Similar syrups can even be made from walnut, birch or palm trees.

  The weather during the thaw decides when the season ends. As the days warm, the tree's own spring biology changes the taste of the sap until it turns unpalatable. Scientists suspect a rise in amino acids is behind it. That late-season taste has a name among producers, and it is one of several flavour faults that the later chapters will meet.

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• 3. The First Sugar Makers

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  The Algonquians cut V-shaped incisions into tree trunks at the start of the spring thaw. They slid reeds or curved pieces of bark into the cuts, and the sap ran into clay buckets or tightly woven birch-bark baskets. Indigenous peoples of northeastern North America are the first known makers of maple syrup and maple sugar. Oral traditions and archaeological evidence both show the practice is far older than the arrival of Europeans.

  Concentrating the sap began with the cold. Producers left it out overnight and threw away the layer of ice that formed on top. Sleds then carried the thickened sap to large fires, where it boiled in clay pots. Several pots often stood side by side, and the liquid moved from one to the next as it thickened.

  Popular belief says syrup came from dropping heated stones into wooden bowls. The source calls that mistaken for the Northeast, where clay pots had been in use for thousands of years. Hot stones may still have turned up in the upper Midwest and Canada, where hollowed logs and birchbark containers replaced clay.

  Nobody has an authenticated account of how it all began. One popular legend has a cook using maple sap instead of water to prepare venison for a chief. Rituals grew up around the work. The first full moon of spring was the Sugar Moon, and it was marked with a Maple Dance. In many Indigenous dishes, maple syrup took the place of the salt that European cooking relied on.

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• 4. Settlers and the Sugar Shack

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  André Thevet, who held the title Royal Cosmographer of France, wrote that Jacques Cartier drank maple sap on his Canadian voyages. When European colonists arrived, local Indigenous peoples showed them how to tap certain maples during the spring thaw. By 1680, settlers and fur traders were harvesting maple products themselves.

  The Europeans changed the method. Instead of cutting into the bark, they drilled tapholes into the trunk with augers. Wooden spouts went into the holes, and a wooden bucket hung from each one. Many buckets were cut from a thick tree trunk and hollowed from one end, which left a seamless, watertight container.

  Before the 19th century, maple was mostly valued as concentrated sugar, in liquid or crystal form. The reason was simple. Cane sugar had to be shipped in from the West Indies. Full buckets were emptied into barrels, pots or hollowed logs, often mounted on sledges or wagons pulled by draft animals.

  The boiling was slow. Sap went back to a base camp and into large metal vessels, either over an open fire or inside a purpose-built shelter. That shelter is the sugar shack. It also goes by sugarhouse, sugar cabin, sugar shanty and, in French, cabane à sucre. Around the American Civil War, a new kind of pan would begin to shorten that wait.

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• 5. Pans, Pipes and Pumps

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  Around the time of the American Civil War, syrup makers swapped heavy, rounded iron kettles for large, flat sheet-metal pans. The flat shape exposed more surface to the heat, so more water left as steam. Around the same time, cane sugar replaced maple sugar as the main sweetener in the United States. Producers responded by putting their marketing effort behind syrup.

  The first evaporator was patented in 1858. In 1872 came a version with two pans and a metal arch, or firebox, which cut boiling time sharply. Around 1900, producers bent the tin bottoms of their pans into flues, adding heated surface and trimming the boil again. Some added a finishing pan as a last stage.

  Plastic bags began to replace buckets, and the producer could see from a distance how full each one was. Tractors took over hauling vats of sap through the sugar bush. Heat came from wood, oil, natural gas, propane or steam.

  The 1970s brought a flood of change. Plastic tubing, experimental since early in the century, was perfected, and sap could run straight from the tree to the evaporator house. Vacuum pumps joined the tubing. Preheaters recycled heat that would have been lost in steam. Reverse-osmosis machines pulled part of the water from the sap before it was boiled.

  In 2009, researchers at the University of Vermont unveiled a tap that stops sap flowing back into the tree. That cuts bacterial contamination and discourages the tree from sealing its own borehole. Experiments suggest saplings might replace mature trees in plantations. Thinner trunks need less extreme day-to-night temperature swings to start the sap, so production could spread to warmer climates.

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• 6. Boiling It Down

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  Between 20 and 50 volumes of sap go into the pan to make one volume of syrup. The range depends on how sweet the sap is. For sap at 1.5 per cent sugar, 57 units are needed for one unit of syrup. Sap at 3.5 per cent needs only 25. Even within a single tree, the sugar content wanders.

  The finish line is a temperature, 4.1 degrees Celsius above the boiling point of water. Because that boiling point shifts with air pressure, the producer checks the value for pure water on the spot and again during the day. Boil too long and the syrup crystallizes. Stop too soon and it is watery and spoils quickly. Finished syrup reads 66 degrees on the Brix scale, a measure of sugar in solution.

  Filtering removes sugar sand, crystals made mostly of sugar and calcium malate. They are not toxic, but they leave the syrup gritty. Many large producers also use reverse osmosis to separate water first. Smaller producers can run batch recirculating systems, and the most efficient setups raise the sugar concentration to 25 per cent before boiling.

  Packaging happens while the syrup is still at 82 degrees Celsius or hotter. Containers are sealed and turned over, so the hot syrup sterilizes the cap. Further heating makes maple sugar, maple butter or cream, and maple candy or taffy.

  Things can still go wrong. Disinfectants in the equipment, microorganisms, fermentation byproducts and metal leached from cans can all spoil the taste. So can buddy sap, which appears late in the season once the trees begin to bud.

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• 7. Grading Light and Dark

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  On the 28th of June 2014, the Canadian Food Inspection Agency announced in the Canada Gazette that its maple rules would gain new descriptors. The change came at the request of the International Maple Syrup Institute. Before, each state or province had its own classification laws. Now Canada and the United States share one system.

  Canada's revised standards took effect on the 31st of December 2014, and those of the United States Department of Agriculture followed on the 2nd of March 2015. The grades run from Grade A Golden, with delicate taste, through Amber with rich taste and Dark with robust taste, to Very Dark with strong taste. Below them sit processing grade and substandard. Syrup with an off-flavour, uneven colour, cloudiness or sediment cannot be Grade A. It becomes processing grade and may not be sold in containers smaller than 20 litres.

  Colour is measured, not judged by eye. The test is how much light passes through a 10-millimetre sample at a wavelength of 560 nanometres. Golden needs 75 per cent or more transmittance. Amber falls between 50.0 and 74.9. Dark falls between 25.0 and 49.9, and Very Dark is anything below 25.0.

  Syrup collected earlier in the season tends to come out lighter. Golden and amber are milder, while the darker grades have an intense maple flavour and go mostly into cooking and baking.

  Canada made the new system compulsory on the 13th of December 2016. Vermont adopted it early, on the 1st of January 2014. New York followed on the 1st of January 2015. New Hampshire's rules took effect on the 16th of December 2014, with producer compliance required from the start of 2016.

  The old Canadian scale used Canada No. 1 in extra light, light and medium, then No. 2 amber and No. 3 dark. Quebec and Ontario ran their own variants. The United States split syrup into Grade A and Grade B, and Vermont used letters such as AA, with a slightly denser standard. A typical producer's year yielded about 25 to 30 per cent of each No. 1 colour, 10 per cent No. 2 amber and 2 per cent No. 3 dark.

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• 8. The Taste of Maple

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  Agriculture Canada built a flavour wheel that lists 91 distinct flavours that can show up in maple syrup. They are sorted into 13 families, including vanilla, burnt, milky, fruity, floral, spicy, confectionery and maple itself. Tasters judge syrup with a procedure similar to wine tasting. Weather and soil type both shape the result.

  Nobody has fully mapped what makes maple taste like maple. The main contributors are maple furanone, strawberry furanone and maltol. Syrup also holds vanillin, lignans and many organic acids. A newer find is quebecol, a compound created when sap is boiled. Sucrose makes up 99 per cent of the sugars, and the brown colour, so important to appeal and grading, develops during evaporation.

  A 100-gram serving provides 260 calories. It is 32 per cent water and 67 per cent carbohydrate, with no appreciable protein or fat. Manganese and riboflavin are present at high levels, and zinc and calcium at moderate ones.

  One author called it a smooth, silky ingredient whose flavour is simply maple flavour, uniquely different from any other. In North America, syrup tops pancakes, waffles and French toast. It also flavours fritters, ice cream, bacon and sausages. Cooks use it to sweeten baked beans, candied sweet potatoes, pies, tea and hot toddies.

  In South Korea, where small amounts of syrup are made, the tradition is different. People drink the raw sap, called gorosoe, rather than boiling it down.

  Until the 1930s, the United States made most of the world's maple syrup. After rapid growth in the 1990s, Canada now produces more than 80 per cent of it. In 2016 Canada's output was about 73 million kilograms, and its exports were worth C$487 million. In 2023 it shipped $376 million of syrup to the United States, and sold to 68 countries in total.

  Within Canada, Quebec makes 91.6 per cent of the syrup, as of 2022. New Brunswick follows at 4.7 per cent and Ontario at 3.4 per cent. Quebec's share of exports is even higher at 96.8 per cent. In 2016 the province had some 7,300 producers, working with 13,500 farmers.

  Production there runs on quotas handed out through the Quebec Maple Syrup Producers, which also keeps reserves of syrup. A black market in Quebec product exists anyway. In 2017 the organization mandated higher output, in an effort to cement Quebec's lead in the world market.

  Elsewhere in Canada, Manitoba and Saskatchewan tap the box elder, and British Columbia taps the bigleaf maple. A Manitoba maple gives less than half the yield of a comparable sugar maple. In the United States, Vermont has long led, with a record 2.5 million gallons in 2022.

  Cheaper rivals crowd the shelf. Table syrup is mostly corn syrup or high-fructose corn syrup. In 2015 it cost about 8 dollars a gallon, against 40 to 60 for the real thing. Labelling laws bar imitations from using the word maple unless they hold 10 per cent or more natural maple syrup. Producers in nine US states petitioned the Food and Drug Administration in 2016, and that September it issued a consumer advisory about reading ingredient lists.

  Climate change is now pressing on the whole trade. Warmer late winters push the sap season earlier, and hotter summers lower the sugar in the sap. Drought and heavy rain are straining the forests themselves.

  The sugar maple's leaf sits on the Canadian flag, and maple goods fill tourist shops and airports as souvenirs of Canada. West Virginia, New York, Vermont and Wisconsin have all named the sugar maple their state tree. Vermont's state quarter, issued in 2001, shows a scene of sap collection.

  Maple also carried a political charge. Before and during the American Civil War, abolitionists used maple syrup and maple sugar. Most cane sugar and molasses came from the labour of enslaved people in the South.

  During the Second World War, food rationing in the northeastern United States led people to be encouraged to stretch their sugar by using maple syrup and maple sugar. Recipe books were printed to show housewives how. The tree that Algonquians once cut with V-shaped incisions was still feeding people centuries later.

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