During that brief splat of warm weather earlier this month, I noticed a neighbor had accessorized several trees with small metal buckets, covered with a piece of metal, just underneath a metal tube attached to the tree.
I knew from experience he was collecting the sap from a few maples to be slowly cooked down until it was maple syrup.
A couple of years ago he told me he got started during the great Covid pandemic shutdown. The experiment that gave him something to do and was a reason to get out of the house. He said he could get anywhere from a couple quarts to a gallon each spring.
It would be cheaper just to buy a bottle from the store than making his own, “but I like to tap into the old ways once in a while,” he said.
The Canadians like their syrup to the point it seems obsessive. We have all seen their national flag with its bright red maple leaf front and center.
Canada’s first national anthem, “The Maple Leaf Forever,” paid tribute to their beloved tree. The Toronto Maple Leafs National Hockey League team is named in the tree’s honor, along with many other products. The maple leaf is proudly displayed on some of their higher-denomination coins.
Maple syrup producers in Quebec have their own strategic reserves. Think of it in terms of the strategic oil reserves, only much smaller and far more sticky. When it is a very good year for syrup, the excess is put into the reserve for when it might be needed in a less-abundant year.
It is also a good method to maintain price stability so the producers can stay in business. Canada has a long history of creating strategic reserves for such commodities as wheat, eggs and milk.
There are three heavily guarded maple syrup depots in Quebec, with a combined capacity of 133 million pounds, enough to fill over 50 full sized Olympic swimming pools. All the syrup is stored in tightly-sealed 55-gallon drums.
Even best attempts to keep valuable safes under lock and key don’t always work. Somehow between 2006 and 2018, someone or ones with very sticky fingers made off with a lot of syrup.
The 2006 first heist saw an estimated 1,000 55-gallon barrels vanish. The syrup producers and insurance company wanted to keep this national prestige-destructive scandal on the QT, so it was not reported until later.
There were more thefts in 2011. For several years Mother Nature had been generous, and thousands of barrels were filled and put into storage. Somehow some were tapped and drained but left in place. Security patrols looked at the warehouses, assumed all was in place and they moved on.
It wasn’t until 2011, when the harvest had been low, that it was decided to keep prices stable by releasing and selling off some of the reserves.
The surprise came when workers shifted the barrels onto forklifts and realized they were y empty. In all, some 9,000 barrels had mysteriously been drained. Depots started installing cameras, motion detectors and better night-watch security people.
The stolen syrup itself was moved to the black market, and bootleggers smuggled it across the border to Vermont and New Hampshire. There was good reason: both states also relied on maple syrup and products to boost their revenues and employment. Both states had also suffered low sap harvests, so the thieves made a tidy profit.
Elsewhere, several hundred empty barrels were discovered on backroads between Quebec and secret smugglers’ coves in New Brunswick. It was believed they were put onto freighters and taken to Europe.
In 2012 the Mounties, as always, got their men when the maple syrup heist boys were rounded up, arrested, charged and sent to prison.
The final (for now) chapter in the Great Maple Syrup caper was written in 2024 with a television show called “The Sticky.” Amazon underwrote the costs, but it had only six episodes. Even “Queen of Scream” Jamie Lee Curtis could not stir up enough interest in a one-trick pony show.
Today a few states in northern New England and areas of Canada produce maple syrup on a fairly large scale, not only filling little glass and plastic jars, but a variety of candies sold in the area and across the country. The Vermont County Store catalog lists many.
The larger producers now rely on rubber or plastic hoses, pumps and siphons to get sap from trees into the big containers. Tractors, rather than horse-drawn sleds, take hundreds of gallons of sap to boiling sheds, where it is converted into pure syrup. Natural gas cookers have replaced wood fires and computers monitor everything in the name of efficiency.
Here in Michigan and the upper Midwest, maple sap has been tapped and converted into syrup since pioneer days. The reason was simple: There were maple trees, the pioneers knew how to tap and boil the sap and. compared to sugar that had to be imported, it was free.
My great grandfather and his family tapped the maples on their homestead, getting about 10 to 20 gallons of sap from each of the older trees and less from the smaller. younger ones. Think of it in terms of giving blood at a blood drive: it doesn’t do you any harm, and being tapped doesn’t harm the trees. It takes about 10 gallons of sap to make a quart of syrup.
They emptied tap buckets once or twice a day
Each day, sometimes once or twice a day, emptied their tap buckets into larger pails and took them on horse-drawn sleighs up to an area outside the barn, where it was poured into a large cauldron set over a fire. Endless hours were devoted to stirring and watching the pot to make sure it did not get too hot and spoil.
Our family put its hoard of maple syrup into Red Wing Pottery jars and stored it in the manmade cave on the land that had been their first home.
Today historical societies in our area maintain old practices so children can see and learn how it was done back in the “good old days” that are better in nostalgia than real life.
At medical centers concerted research has begun, seeking possible medical uses for maple sap through the “One Team, One Health” project. Michigan’s UP is the perfect site because it has more maple trees than New Hampshire, Vermont and Maine combined. Scientists and physicians are looking at the benefits of drinking maple sap water for cancer survivors.
Koreans some time ago discovered that maple sap and water contains many of the same electrolytes needed by cancer patients in recovery, but because it is all natural, without the nasty side effects.
