With spring comes maple syrup season. This is about the only time I wish I lived a little further south because we don’t, with very few exceptions, have sugar maples around here. If we did, though, I’d be out there with every pot, bucket and other container I could find, drilling holes, sinking spiles and collecting sap. Once, some friends and I tapped a few maple trees. We lived together in a house while we were going to college and although we paid rent, the landlord paid the utilities. We decided, then, that it would be a good idea to use the kitchen stove to boil down our buckets of sap. We really did have buckets, too: we tapped ten trees with three spiles each. I seem to remember it taking about a week to boil down everything and in the process, we peeled the wallpaper off all of the walls on the main floor. Luckily, college ended shortly afterward, but I bet that was a whopping hydro bill.
Maple trees. Used in the production of maple syrup.
Depending on who is asked, it has been a great year for maple syrup production around here. The weekend before Easter, a local community held it’s maple syrup festival and they had already collected enough sap to make 80 litres of syrup for the weekend. That means that, unless the trees are unusually sweet, they had to collect 1600 litres of sap and boil it down. Before Easter. Which came in March this year. With a start like that, it certainly would seem that a good season was underway. Also, we have had great weather for sap collecting: cold nights and warm, sunny days. So, with it being such a productive season, I wonder why the people we bought ‘maple syrup’ from felt they had to make it with cane sugar and, we suspect, maple flavouring.
Jenn took Hunter to a local sugar bush – not the one previously mentioned, either – to see the process and possibly get in on a sleigh ride. I don’t know if they actually managed to go on a sleigh ride or not, nor do I even know how the day went because all Jenn could talk about when she came home was the syrup and how poor a quality it is, which was a shame, since I was really looking forward to some locally produced syruppy goodness. It is as black as used motor oil and tastes distincly unlike maple. At first, before I tasted it, I thought maybe it was burnt or it was the last run of the tree for the season and even at that, they must have wrung out the tree for every last drop. Once I had tasted it, though, it was pretty evident that it was a product of either added cane sugar or just plain ol’ cane sugar with added maple flavour. Either way, I wasn’t impressed.
I’m not mad or upset: afterall, it’s only a $15 bottle of syrup and hardly worth losing sleep over, but I would like to know when a time-honoured rite of spring became a get-rich-quick scheme.
Sugar cane. Not used in the production of maple syrup.
*I used photos found on the ‘net in this post. If they belong to you or someone you know, please notify me and I’ll give credit or remove them.
Filed under: 1 | Tagged: cheating, maple syrup, money
