Forests are a common feature across the United States. Besides providing scenic areas to walk through, these forests also provide us with the ability to make maple syrup. In this video, you will learn how maple syrup is made.
Maple trees can live to be over a hundred years old. These beautiful trees are the start of the maple syrup production process.
In late winter, arborists tap maple trees to harvest the maple sap. This works because maple trees store carbohydrates from summertime to use as food during the winter when they don’t have leaves. These carbohydrates make their way into the sap and are at their peak around late winter to early spring. That is why this is the optimal sap harvesting time. The other reason this is the perfect time is that the temperature must be above freezing during the day, but below freezing at night.
In the olden days, maple syrup makers used to use buckets to collect sap. Now, they use a series of tubes that drain the syrup to a central collection area. A lot of sap is needed for this process. In fact, it takes 40 gallons of sap to make one gallon of maple syrup. All this sap is put into an evaporator where the sap is boiled down into maple syrup.
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