University Place

The History of Maple Syruping in Wisconsin

– Today we are pleased to introduce Susan Denholm as part of the Wisconsin Historical Museum’s History Sandwiched In lecture series. The opinions expressed today are those of the presenter and are not necessarily those of the Wisconsin Historical Society or the museum’s employees. Susan is a naturalist at the Aldo Leopold Nature Center in Monona, where she has had the pleasure of teaching children and adults for more than 20 years. Prior to coming to Madison, Susan enjoyed living and teaching elementary school in New Hampshire and Vermont, which incidentally both rank in the top five U.S. states for maple syrup production, along with Wisconsin. How sweet is that? Susan received a master’s degree in education from Washington University in St. Louis. Her outdoor teaching skills and knowledge were enhanced by a national outdoor leadership wilderness course in Wyoming and the completion of the Master Gardener Program through the University of Wisconsin Extension right here in Madison. So here today to discuss the history of maple sugaring in Wisconsin, please join me in welcoming Susan Denholm. (audience applauds)

– Thank you, well I wanted to start by just pointing out I do, I work at the Aldo Leopold Nature Center, which is just about 10 minutes away from here. If you ever get a chance to walk around there, there are almost a hundred acres tucked away at a place where the first time I went there, I didn’t know there could be that much land still in town. So there’s wetlands, there’s a pond, we have the Woodland Park nearby, Edna Taylor is about 50 acres of Madison property. And we’re able to take people out, and in an hour and a half see all these different habitats. It’s a wonderful outdoor classroom space, so if you ever get a chance, we do have a Maple Fest at the end of March every year, which is now open and free to the public, so please feel free to stop by. The “History of Maple Syruping in Wisconsin,” and why are we talking about it right now, is an interesting one. I realize this is the best time of year for you to go out in your neighborhood and find a tree that you might want to start having history with, to tap. But I think it would be important to say which is a maple, and which is not. And so I brought a few little samples, and I think, did you get your handouts? Those are your handouts. Those are coming from about four hours north of here, where the sugar maples have begun to turn. But I realize the time of year that people go to tap a tree, the leaves are missing. So how do people know? One is look now, tap it, make a mark now I mean, and then you’ll know. But the other is that there’s a very simple thing about how trees branch. And that is that oak trees branch oppositely, that when you look at the leaves, unlike my plastic demo, the leaves will be opposite each other on the stems. The buds will be opposite each other on a stem.

Only a few trees bud and branch this way in Wisconsin. The maple is one of them, the ash is another, those are two that you might have trouble differentiating between, but the sugar maple has a really pointy, sharp bud. Everything else, besides dogwood, which is too skinny, so you’re never going to tap it, is going to bud and branch alternately the way our oaks do. And typically you’re going to find oaks and maples in the same forest in these Eastern Woodlands. So here we see people out there enjoying our Nature Center. Our audience is primarily two to 14 year olds. That’s the majority of who comes to see us on school field trips. Aldo Leopold in the Sand County Almanac wrote, “There are two spiritual dangers in not owning a farm. One is the danger of supposing that breakfast comes from the grocery, and the other that heat comes from the furnace.” I want to add another one today. I think there’s a spiritual danger, and thinking that maple syrup comes from the grocery store and not appreciating that the sugar is totally a natural process that happens between nature and the tree itself. And I think when we do our sugar festival, it surprises me how many of us, including me at the time when I started working there, just don’t appreciate that connection between the fact that the sugar is being made there.

We get a lot of people coming out there now who it may be the first time that they’re really appreciating that the sugar is made in the tree. While I’m talking today, I’m hoping to talk a little bit about the original maple sugar sap collectors and the natural process that makes that sap so sweet, what causes it to flow, a little bit about the human discovery that there was sugar in sap, because when you take sap right from the tree, it looks like water. It looks like water, and it almost tastes like water. It may only be 2% sugar. So we’ll talk a little bit about how did any people ever get the idea that there was sugar worth distilling and condensing. We’ll talk about some of the Native American techniques and tools, and I do have some things out there for you to look at, and then move on to what happened when pioneers started emigrating and settling here in Wisconsin. Talk about some of the innovations that have increased the efficiency of making it, and then give you a little taste at the end, only if you want it, as I say, only if you want it. If you prefer a corn syrup-based product, please (laughs) go for that.

Briefly, Aldo Leopold only lived to be 61. We’re really proud of him in Wisconsin, because he started the Wildlife Department at the university, and you’ll hear his name in Madison all the time connected with schools, and connected with the Nature Foundation up north. But I am impressed at how young he was, and how much he talked about the connection between people and the natural world, which is exactly what we’ll be talking about now. There he is. Have you seen those benches, the classic bench, which quite honestly he would turn around, sit the other way, hold the binoculars, rest his elbows on the back of the bench, those are heavy binoculars you can see on the table, and be able to rest for a long time with very still hands. If you sit on one of those, that’s a really genuinely designed bench, you might feel like you’re leaning back a bit. But it’s so that he could be turned around, coffee at his side. So who were the original tree tappers? In Wisconsin, the originals, and they continue to this day to appreciate the sweet sap, are yellow-bellied sapsuckers and gray tree squirrels. They are the most apt to be out there drilling, pecking and chewing with their little teeth when the sap is flowing. So when you watch them, you get a good idea that there must be something unique about the sap that’s in a tree.

We always want to make sure we know where that sugar and that sweetness is coming from. I think most of us learn about photosynthesis in fourth grade and maybe learned enough to pass the test, that’s how I was. But the process of photosynthesis is just an amazing thing about bringing, you know, using the energy of sunlight to convert the air, the carbon dioxide in air with the water that’s being drawn up through the roots, not through the leaves, but through the roots, and the nutrients that are coming up from the soil. I’ll talk later, there’s an amazing mineral composition in maple syrup that’s going to be coming up from that soil. So that process of photosynthesis is going to mean that right now while we still have green leaves, those leaves are going to be converting those four ingredients into starches which are right now stored a lot in the chlorophyll and the chloroplasts. But as the leaves begin to stop synthesizing all those ingredients, what you’ll start noticing is the leaves are going to blow a little bit more in the wind, then the wind’s going to get a little stronger, sort of like today, and the connection between the leaf and the stem which has been transporting water and nutrients up and starch down, is going to get weaker and weaker, and then it’s going to drop; the petiole where it’s connected is just going to weaken, weaken, weaken, and finally it’s going to drop.

So how is that tree going to survive winter? It’s going to store the food that it needs, some of it within the bark, there’ll still be a little bit of photosynthesis through the trunk, but mostly it’s going to go dormant. And all that sap is going to flow down and be stored underground, sort of like its own personal root cellar down there, and be waiting, just be waiting all winter. There we go. When we talk about who the first people were to discover that there was sugar in sap, this map does a good job of showing us the range of Woodland Algonquians. And those tribes of people who use the Algonquian language are why. You’ll see the Cree, you’ll see the Micmac who are over in Michigan. We talk about Iroquois, Ojibwe. We use Winnebago. Some of these names are not acceptable anymore as tribal names, but at the time that this was done in 1997, these were the names that were being used. So the range of this tribe of Eastern Woodland people is pretty much also the range of the sugar maple. Sugar maples were not growing in Europe. Sugar maples were not growing west of the Mississippi. They were primarily growing east of the Mississippi. So when you talk about who the first people were to tap these trees and turn sap into syrup, first you have to have the presence of the tree. And it was not a tree growing all over the world. Now if you go back to Korea long before people were living here and recording history, Koreans have always tapped the trees and been drinking the sap itself, because as you’ll see later with the nutrient content, it’s a really strong bone-supportive product. It’s pretty amazing, actually.

So here you get the idea of where people were who were making it. Because we didn’t have recorded history, the history of people turning sap into syrup is going to be passed down by stories, and legends and myths. And the one that we most commonly tell is the one of Chief Woksis, that’s an Iroquois story in that, which is part of that Algonquian language group, and his wife Moqua. And what we say is the chief, as the man of his family, had the job to go out every day and do the hunting. I do have a prop. And so he proudly heads off with his hatchet into the woods every day. And maybe he’s hunting moose, the stories often talk about it being moose or venison that he might bring home. And he came back with his hatchet, plunked it into a nearby tree, which was good, kept it up high from the children. All day long Moqua’s job’s keeping the fire going, tanning hides, keeping the children out of the fire, and going down to the spring to get fresh water so that she can do her cooking. Well one day Moqua noticed after Chief Woksis had taken his hatchet, headed out to the woods, and she was cooking and realized she’d never made time to go to the spring for fresh water.

Luckily her makuk had been placed right by a tree, and it was actually dripping water into her makuk. So that would be a birchbark basket that they would have used as a vessel long before metal was introduced. And she tasted it, and it tasted like water, and it looked like water, and it’s coming from a tree, and she trusted that tree. It’s one that animals, deer nibble at it, and squirrels nibble at it. And so she took that water, poured it over the leftover moose from the day before and started to cook, and did the rest of her chores, and as long as she didn’t get the fire up higher than the level of the liquid, she didn’t burn her makuk. You ever done that experiment with a Dixie cup? You put it in the fire, and you watch the liquid. As long as the liquid is there against the paper, it won’t burn. So she had to be very careful, especially towards the end, as you also do making maple syrup, not to scorch what was inside. So she probably smelled wood smoke, but oh, Chief Woksis, what he smelled coming back home was this rich aroma of caramelly maple as it was getting more and more condensed and distilled. And he came in, and he sat down, and he tasted that moose, and it was the best moose he’d ever had because it was sweet, and basically like the original barbecue sauce, and he said what did you do differently, and she said not, water. Wait a minute, the water was dripping from the tree.

So is it possible that that legend happened to allow people to figure out that there was sugar in sap, and that by removing and steaming away the water, they could concentrate the sugar; It definitely is. There are stories like that in many different tribal histories. There’s another one that’s a myth. And that is that for the explaining the seasons, the idea that people could go and lie underneath a sugar maple and just catch the sap in their mouths, and it was so sweet and wonderful, and the Great Spirit walked into the village one day and no one was working. No one was building fires, no one was planting or gathering. And the Great Spirit looked at the people lying there, and this is not going to work. Teeth are rotting, muscles are softening, the work’s not being done, and so the idea came about that we have to have the seasons be shorter. We can’t have it be dripping all year long. Not only that, we need to dilute that sap and make it less and less sweet. And so the Great Spirit, the great creator took his makuk and went over to the Great Lakes and gathered water, and poured it into the top of every maple tree, diluting that sweet taste so that after a while the people were saying we know there’s sugar here, but it just tastes like water. And so the problem was solved, and the people knew that to get that sweet treat, they would have to work and work and work, and in the end what they would get would be barely a taste of sugar.

We tell that to children and say myth or a legend? It makes a good story, and it’s awfully fun to walk around with a bottle of syrup and just let the children open their mouths and drip a little syrup and watch it come down their chins. We might wish it were that way. When we talk about the techniques that natives would have used, it’s going to be simple. This is an illustration that already, I’m sure you see a little bit of metal in the picture, so while Native Americans were probably tapping way back into the 1500s, there is a record written of the presence of the trees back in the 1500s-0let me find that note therebut the actual observation by Europeans who were making written records of this wouldn’t have been until 1557, when we know that a French explorer wrote about the process Native Americans were really using to refine the sugars that are in sap. Again, in 1606 Marc Lescarbot wrote a detailed description of the Micmac people over in Michigan collecting and distilling sap. So in the 1700s, we’re going to have European contact. Things are going to change a lot. There’s a debate about whether natives would have been able to actually distill it all the way down to the syrup that we think of as being 66.9% sugar. If you’re using something like this, you would have brought the sap and dumped it in a wooden trough.

The Native Americans would then have stones in their fire, lift the heated stones and put it into the trough, and that way they could cook. So we can imagine the heating element going into that sap, but would it be enough to really get it down to that dry sugary place without what happened when metal was introduced, where you had increased surface area and you could control the temperature better. So that’s one debate, and there’s no firm archeological evidence to answer that. You can find a little bit of copper, in terms of could there have been a vessel where you could have really cooked something for a long time down to a small amount, but that is something that is not definitive. I put a few different words, a Cree word that we use often is sisibaskwat for that time of melting snow right at the end of winter, just as you’re starting to have that day where the sun comes out, and it smells good, and it thaws, and a skunk goes waddling out ’cause it comes out of its burrow. And a chipmunk peeks out, and you say finally, finally spring is here. And you go to sleep, and the next morning you come up and there’s fresh powdery snow, and you think no. And you go to sleep the next night and there’s snow, and it starts to get crusty, and then you start to see bare patches of ground, and then you come out the next day and it’s snowed again.

If you’ve had a chance to read Little House in the Big Woods, and I noticed that there was a speaker here in March who talked about the Ingalls family. We’d be talking about around 1860 that Ma Ingalls would have been here in Wisconsin. That’s about when we start talking about the influence of European settlers on the way native people were producing maple syrup. But in that book, they talk about that sugar snow, and Laura tastes the snow, thinking the snow’s going to taste like sugar. And her pa goes and explains this whole thing, that when you get that nice snowfall, that means that the trees are not going to bud out as fast. So the season is all going to depend on the weather. If we get that nice late snow, and here I am saying nice late snow, where you might say no, I’ve got to shovel again, it’s going to slow the bud burst. Once the burst, the bud bursts, the flavor of the sap actually changes. So the whole season, this whole time of melting snow has to do with the temperature. The temperature needs to get above freezing during the day but then drop back down. We’ll talk more about what’s happening inside the tree. I have the Ojibwa language there and an Algonquian word. The tools that you see, there’s a simple wooden spile or spout that has been carved out. Often white ash would be used, or cedar would be used because it wouldn’t impart a strong flavor to the syrup. The buckets are on the ground. And the efficiency wasn’t so good. You can see they’ve carved a V shape in the trees.

So they’ve made a very big invasive cut to allow the sap to flow, and they often would kill a tree in that process. So that was a bit of a problem. You see the big trough there, and some of the, and then there’s a makuk, willow basket, and they show that they’re just slowly, slowly stirring it down. Another favorite thing would be to cook it so far down that you could make the sugar candies, remember those leaves? You eat one of those (laughs) that’s a lot of sugar. The idea of that would be you can store sugar that way without it spoiling. Syrup’s going to spoil. Sap is going to spoil. Sap is a lot like milk as far as how long you can leave it out of the refrigerator. So once it starts to flow, you’ve either got to keep it cold, which if you’re up farther north and you can set it in the snow, it’ll be fine. If not, you need to cook it down quickly. How do we know it’s the right season? This is the best sign I know. Any place that squirrel has been gnawing, the sap’s going to start flowing if the temperature’s gone up above freezing during the day. And you may go out first thing in the morning and see an icicle hanging from the tree. We may call it a sapsicle. There’s a wonderful photograph you can see where there’s actually a bird hanging upside down drinking the sap off the bottom. And even that will concentrate the sugars.

Water will be constantly evaporating as it slides down there, so when you say how did anyone figure out there was sugar in sap when it looks like water? These sapsicles are actually. You’ll notice the sweetness on your tongue. It’s really hard to notice two, three4% sugar you’ll start to notice. The sap the beginning of the season has more sugar, maybe 4%. When I taste it, if I haven’t already had something sweet, I usually will taste the sweetness. Later in the season, or if I’ve decided to tap a silver maple, or a red maple, or something that happens to be nearby, I’m only going to get about 2% sugar, it’s almost nothing. And we’ll talk more about how it gets concentrated. But the sugar maple has the highest concentration. Native Americans, some people will actually tap birch trees as well. And again, it’s only about one, 1.1% sugar. Here I see the influence of trade. So you start talking about the 1800s. Early in Wisconsin you had Native Americans, you had French explorers, you had really very little European settlement here until after Nicolet came through, until after the War of 1812, until people really came and natives had been moved out of the way, which makes it very confusing, because which group of people was here making sugar, or making sap into sugar, in the 1400s, 1500s, 1600s, it changed as Native Americans were being pushed farther and farther west. So the mixing of tribes that would have been here when early Europeans came here would not have been the same as if you had come, say a hundred years earlier. Pretty much the same technique except the addition of those metal pots.

Adding the metal allows you to increase the heat and speed up the boiling process, but also having a flat bottom is going to be a big advance that’s going to increase the efficiency of making the syrup. A sap run is the sweet goodbye of winter. It is the fruit of the equal marriage of the sun and the frosts. The sap is flowing up during the day towards the stem and the branches, where the buds are going to need that food energy to open. And then at night some might go down, but mostly it stays in place. We used to think that it really flowed all down at night, but we talk now that there’s actually lateral movement of sap within a tree, and that at night it doesn’t so much sink down as freeze in place. But there are these open pores in the wood, and so then in the morning there’s going to be a negative pressure that’s going to pull the sap back up out of the roots again. So a little bit about the recorded history that I wanted to make sure that I emphasize it, that the lack of firm archeological proof about the exact beginning of when native people were refining maple sap into syrup and consequently sharing their techniques with European settlers means I’m not putting a year to it.

In 1540, Jacques Cartier wrote about the presence of the trees themselves in North America, but in 1557 is the first time we read about that process of refining the sugar in the sap. And there’s 1606, so now we’re talking about the Micmac, the Michigan area natives actually collecting and distilling sap. Another way they could distill it is just by letting it freeze overnight and peeling that frozen ice off the top. That would already have the heavy sugar settling down below, and that would be one way to reduce your cooking time. Freeze it, toss off the ice, and you’ll already have refined it somewhat. 1700s we have Europeans moving into the state, but the settlement really starts around the 1800s, and when we talk about the change in population in Wisconsin, I mean we really have an explosion of population from about 1836 to 1850. We talk about the population Wisconsin being of European settlers, we’ll be precise on that, being 11,000, about in 1836. But then in, 14 years later, being 300, over 300,000, so we just exploded. So the making of maple sugar was very big.

The dairy industry influenced the making of maple, so as dairy farmers began to settle in Wisconsin, they began to use what they knew about moving fluids to apply towards sugaring. I’m going to take a minute to look at the internal tree structure, to just give you an idea of where the sap is flowing. Every tree is similar, we’ve got the protective outer bark, we have that inner bark, the cambium, where new cells are growing and the expansion of the tree takes place. We have the secondary bark, the phloem, and where, that we say flow low, kind of that the sap can move down. It’s that vascular, there we are, the sapwood itself, that yellow band, is going to be where the sap is flowing up through tubes. So when we go to tap a tree, we only have to go as far as the sapwood. We wouldn’t even want to go to the center, the heartwood is dead. Those cells are stable, it’s great for building furniture. It’s not going to be the part that shifts and cracks if you’ve made something. What we want is that active live tissue, which is the sapwood. I know this is sort of a small example. We don’t tap a tree until it’s at least 10 inches in diameter. My sample up over there is about the size of a tree that would be about 40 years old to be 10 inches in diameter before we would really move any of its life energy, any of its blood.

I think about what it’s like if I want to donate blood at the Red Cross, I have to be above a certain age, I have to be above a certain weight, and they’re only going to take a certain volume, and they’re not going to let me come back for a certain amount of time. It’s the same idea, you know, do we harm the tree, do we weaken the tree? We are removing energy that might be needed by the tree. So we only put one tap into a tree that’s 10 inches in diameter. As the trees get bigger, as it goes to about 20 inches in diameter, which is going to be more like 60 inches around, then we’ll put in a second tap. We’re not going to put it right next to the where the one was before, that tissue scars. You get a lot of mineralization inside the tree. If you really get big, you’ll see three spiles or spouts tapped into the tree. But more often now, you won’t see people putting five. Long ago you’d see trees up, the really big ones, up to five spouts, but now we don’t see that. So here we see the 10-inch tree. People usually tap higher. You notice that the Native American had showed it down low. Well to increase their efficiency, they wanted their bucket near their tap. But as we go to some of the more modern spiles and spouts, we’re able to hang a bucket right from the tree. So the introduction of metal has allowed us to do a lot of things differently.

Buckets can be covered, keeping the squirrels and the deer out of them, or horses. We can tap the metal, and I know this, tap, don’t pound, if you’re ever doing this. A lot of the spiles that you buy are sort of that, you know, that soft cast metal, and tapI know this, ’cause I broke one last year. If you just tap it in, that’s what you want to do. If you take a good whack, you can break it right off. I did that. So when we talk about the pioneers moving the sap around, we talk about they’re still, they’re the machines. They’re carrying the sap using yokes and buckets. They’re using horses and bigger barrels. And they get the idea of creating a sugar shack. The idea that they can be cooking late until night, and if it starts to snow again, they’re not going to be diluting their syrup at the same time that they’re trying to concentrate it. So that idea of putting a building around your evaporator pan was new. It was a very normal thing for a dairy farmer who had a lot of woods to also be a maple sugar farmer. Sugar was expensive in the 1800s. You know it was coming from the West Indies, it was made with slave labor.

About 1860, the price of sugar came down, and the demand for maple also went down. So there wasn’t a lot of development going on until around the 1900s when again, the demand for, the price of sugar was going up, and the idea of having a homegrown source was there. Actually Thomas Jefferson tried to get maple sugaring going in Virginia, but you know it’s just a little too warm, a little bit too far south. If you go up in the hills, you can get the trees at a higher altitude still down in West Virginia, where you can make sap into syrup, and they’ll flow that way. But it didn’t work out in Virginia. When we have our trees, we like to watch the flow rates. We like to see what was the weather like, what’s the temperature, what’s the flow rate. You see what the slowest is up there?

We’ve got the date, we asked the kids to write down what do they see, how sunny is it, how windy is it, how hot or cold. We can have children arrive at 9:30 in the morning, and it’s 20 degrees on the top there, and it’s not dripping at all, nothing’s moving, tree is still. And by the time they leave, oh, that goes to the yeah, well, 8:47, that looks like a couple days later, we can have the sap flowing. Typically around 10:00 in the morning it’ll start to pick up, and so we typically will tap on the east side of the tree so the sun hits that first. And then you’ll see the rate change. It’s a 35 day degree down about 2/3 of the way on March 22nd, around lunchtime. It’s sunny, and the sap is flowing at a rate of 50 drops per minute. So we’ll time it like that. All it takes is the weather. If it gets really hot day after day, we’re not going to have that pressure, we’re not going to have that flow. If it gets freezing over for a whole week, sap may stop completely, that’s normal. We talk about the average sap flow being 37 days, but really it may span over 57 days, but start and stop and start and stop, or start and warm up and be done completely. It’s totally weather-dependent. You know, especially with kids coming, I wish I could turn those trees on. We need like a Disney tree, but we don’t have it.

So moving on from a more pioneer-style, where people are providing the power for tapping, for carrying, for cooking, the flat evaporator pan would have been something that began in the late 1800s, around the 1870s in Vermont, so it would have worked its way to Wisconsin around the same time. And increasing that surface area made a big difference to how quickly you could boil the sap down. A modern tree tapping operation is going to go to plastics. And there’s a patent in the 1950s, 1959 for using some of these dairy industry plastics for tree tapping. And you’ll see over there, there’s the blue plastic tubing, and you’ll see up in the slide the tubing could connect and create a network throughout the woods. If you’re driving up there sometimes you’ll see purple, sometimes you’ll see blue, sometimes you’ll see green. I’ve heard that the idea of the darker tubing is so that the sun’s energy will start heating up the frozen sap earlier in the morning. Now the thing that’s going to make it flow is typically you put your sugar bush, or your sugar bush is on the hill, your collection of trees, and your shack is at the bottom. The force of gravity and the temperature rising is going to get the sap to just start flowing down.

Here’s a nice little sugar shack down at the bottom of the hill and a big evaporator pan. When I visited one of the sugar places in New Hampshire, I got to see a table that was about three times the length of that, so maybe it was close to 30 feet long where they would filter the sap on the way in. There are some minerals that are in sap that will actually granulate, and not into a sugar but into like they call it a sand, like a minerally sand that they want to filter out. So they may filter it on the way in, and then they put it into the evaporator pan on the one side, and as the density increases, as the water evaporates and the sugar gets heavier, it’ll move down the pan. It’s at the end you have to watch it. I don’t know if any of you have done any candy making, but it’s pretty tricky towards the end to watch the temperature. Sap, at is going to be at whatever temperature, it’s going to become syrup. It’s going to be concentrated enough when you reach seven degrees above boiling. So here at this altitude, we’re talking about at 219 degrees. I’m now going to have about 66.9% sugar. If I were at a higher altitude, I might be boiling to a different temperature. But seven degrees above whatever is the boiling temperature of water.

What fuel are they using? You can see it’s stacked in the back. The early fuel would have been wood. You’ll see people using propane now. I had a man come on a tour one time who said his family used old tires. I’m not going to recommend that. Another story, we talk about pure syrup. One of the things you have to watch for is it’ll foam up and froth, so you’re frequently going to be skimming off that froth and foam at the top. If you’re outside, you might be skimming off some bugs at the same time, or some pieces of whatever have flown in. Towards the end of sugaring, the sugar content goes down, the mineral content goes up, the ants are starting to come out by now, the flies are starting to come by now, you can get some very rare flavors. So quite honestly, what we do is a demonstration. We are not producing maple syrup at our place. We’re tapping trees, and we’re doing a demonstration. We walk away from the fire, we scorch. Every once in a while we have a really good flow and someone pays good attention, and then takes that final part home to really watch it carefully, and then filters it again. There’s a new grading system for syrups now. It used to be that we would talk about that lightest color that’s produced early in the season as being fancy. And if I were making a fancy, let’s say lemon cake back in pioneer days, imagine how that lemon has been brought up from a whole nother part of our country. It’s a really rare thing, or cinnamon, all those things have been brought in and we’ve traded for them. So I don’t want the maple flavor, I want the lemon flavor. So fancy’s going to have a lighter flavor, and so all of them are going to have the same percentage of sugar, but the number of gallons that it took, which I will talk more about over there, is going to be different.

So at 4%, I’ve used less sap to create fancy, which is now going to be called Grade A, Golden Color, Delicate Taste. So they’ve made all of these clear syrups Grade A. And I don’t know how many it is, they started doing this in Canada about three or four years agoThree years ago, I think it was 2015. We do it now in the United States as well. So we’ve got the Grade A Amber, that’s color is rich and flavorful. Used to be called Dark Amber or Grade A Medium Amber. Most people are going to want something at least that color, but if you want the flavor of maple, or even go to that dark, stronger flavor. Now with all of the people who are getting into sausages and barbecued meats and the glazes, the more robust flavors are more desirable than they were 20 years ago. So the Grade A Dark Color Robust flavor used to be often called Grade B. When we go to much less, to a more dense heavier flavor, we talk about commercial grade syrups that are used for say flavoring, the syrups that are mostly corn syrup but have just a little bit or flavoring candies that have it because it’s such a strong flavor. So let’s see here, we’ve got all these improvements that were introduced by Europeans that I want to make sure you get a chance to see, starting with what Native Americans were using, like a makuk, and when they would tap, they would be using something made of birch bark or of wood to actually get the sap from the tree out to their sort of bucket. So that is one way of tapping. And let’s assume that we understand that they are the ones who introduced the idea of taking the maple sap and distilling it, because Europeans did not know about this.

They didn’t come over with a history of getting sugar this way. So honey and maple sugar would have been this here. Native Americans apparently had about, it was more than 12, I think it was 14% of their diet coming from honey and maple. That seems like a lot. Anyway, when we tap trees, we drill about two inches. That’s all it takes to get into where that sapwood is. Native Americans would have used a hatchet and made that V so that the sap could flow down. We’re going to go about waist-high. This is a spile or spout– woops, let me turn that overthat has a hook for hanging the bucket. There are all sorts of different buckets: covered, uncovered, but hanging it from there means we’ve increased the efficiency because the drops are going in here. We’ve also decreased the chance that the tree is going to get ill because we don’t have such a big invasive hole. Another thing we’ll do is we’ll spray bleach water on the drill bit as we go from tree to tree. So all the trees get set up at the beginning of the season, whether you’re using a metal spile or the plastics that I’m going to move to next, you’re going to do this at the beginning when you start seeing that sapsicle, or when you start noticing the weather changing. That’s when you’re going to load all the trees up with the spiles, and you’re going to get all set up. Then add the introduction of plastics, where that spout is completely enclosed. We’re not going to have an open bucket with insects, so we’ve increased the efficiency as far as drops. We’re not going to have to do as much filtering, because we’re not going to have flies and things coming in.

The dairy industry also introduced the idea of using a vacuum pump. And so the same kind of vacuum pump that pulls milk faster through all the tubing to their main holding tank, is now being used to pull sap from the trees. So first thing in the morning, got to wait still, you got to get it warm enough that it’s liquid, they’re pulling it down to the sugar shack. They’re filtering out some of the minerals, but they’re keeping the nutrients and the desirable things in, and the sugars, and then they’re going to boil it and evaporate it. By doing that, they no longer have to carry buckets. They don’t have to keep going out and dumping and transporting. So it really has reduced the amount of work it takes. You could have two people running a hundred trees very easily, once it’s set up. Plastics also meant that we’ve got containers like this, pretty easy to either throw this away, I think at the end of the season most people would. There’s a problem with this plastic bucket. Those squirrels, they will nibble right through here. And we do, we still get the flies going inside there. So, with the Nature Center, we like to tap a tree in different styles, so you can get an idea of what it looks like. This is nice ’cause it’s lightweight. You can just pull this off, very easy to use, but you do have trouble with punctures. Aren’t plastics, plastics are wonderful. When we filter pioneer-style, it was really simple. I mean if I did this at my house, this is all I would need, a few layers of cheesecloth, filter it just to get the grainy stuff out.

Another thing you do is just let it settle. Get it to the right temperature, take it off the heat. Or if you have a huge fire, rake the coals out as fast as you can, so it doesn’t get any hotter. And then as it sits, those minerals, that sandy stuff’s going to drop to the bottom. So the grading of a syrup we talked about. We didn’t really talk about how many gallons it takes. Let me come back and show you an example of what we’re talking about when we’re condensing and distilling sap into syrup. Does anybody already know the answer to that? How many gallons of sap does it take to make a gallon of syrup? We call it the Rule of 86 is how we figure it out. We tap the tree, we take this water-like sap, and we use a hydrometer to measure how much sugar is in it to begin with. If we’re lucky on a good day, at the beginning of the season, on a run, you may have 4% sugar. At that percent, 21 gallons of sap will need to be collected and cooked to make a single gallon of syrup. So that’s a sugar maple on a good day. It’s much more normal, it’s going to be closer to 2%, and if I’ve tapped a few silver maples along, just ’cause they’re in the way, that 2% is going to bring the amount of sugar way down, and I’m going to be cooking at 2% 43 gallons of sap to make a single gallon of syrup.

It’s a lot of work, so you can imagine in the 1860s when sugar became less expensive it was worth bartering and trading at the store for refined sugar that came from the West Indies rather than doing all of the work of tapping, carrying, cooking and storing your syrup. We talk about how to calculate that. The Brix scale is what you talk about when you talk about the amount of sugar, the sugar content in the sap or in the liquid. Oh yeah, 86 gallons, that if you were going to make a gallon of birch syrup, you would be starting with about 86 gallons. That’s a lot of work. It kind of explains why the maple syrup gets to be so expensive. But if that’s what you had, and that was your local, and right on your own land, at the time they’re doing this, it’s not a good time, you can’t plant, your hens are probably not laying, you can be cutting firewood, then the ground starts to get a little soft, you can’t even do that. We’ve got the nutritional content. Take a look at that calcium, riboflavin, magnesium, zinc, manganese, there’s phosphorus in there, vitamin A, vitamin C, iron. It really is what you find in bone-supporting supplements, pretty interesting. You’ll see labeled organic, pure, natural, wild-crafted, sustainable, all those things are true. You don’t need to do anything except not remove too much in a year. Who produces the most, Canada, 73%, United States at 27%. And you can see Wisconsin, we’ve got about 6% of the U.S. production.

And here we have 2017’s production, so you see Vermont, that nice little state is producing the majority. But you can get into the hills in West Virginia and still get a little bit. And here we have that sweet finish, whether it’s maple syrup, maple cream, maple candy, maple cotton candy, I’d never seen that before, or maple sugar, it’s all the same story, which is, it’s sugar, made in the trees that we get to condense and have for ourselves. And that is that.
(audience applauds)