In The Field — Maple Sugarin'

We just finished cooking off our maple syrup for the 2020 season — and despite the interruptions to our otherwise regularly scheduled lives — our final total is just over 8 gallons of finished syrup! I’m pleased to report that this is just about a quart more than last year's yield, so we are trending in a positive direction.

We know we’ve reached the end of the season when the sap starts to taste “buddy” — which refers to the green, vegetal flavor that starts to accumulate in the sap as the flower buds start to open on the tips of the maple branchlets. It’s not a “bad” taste, not at first anyway, but it certainly isn’t the flavor you are after when you make maple syrup. The sap also starts to look a bit cloudy, a noticeable difference from the star-bright clarity of sap we gathered in the weeks leading up.

Since maple syrup is essentially a sap reduction of somewhere around 40 to 1, these buddy flavors start to concentrate along with the sugars. Also, because the ambient temperatures are starting to rise, the bacteria load in the holes we’ve drilled for the spiles (taps) starts to increase too, which I'm told contributes to the cloudiness of the sap.

So, all of these factors mean it’s time for us to pull the taps and start cleaning and packing away the gear for next year. Before we put everything away though, we’ll make a bit of birch syrup first — then it’ll be time to start scouting for turkeys.

In the below Taste of WildFed video, follow along with Daniel through a maple sugaring season in Maine — from tapping trees in the sugarbush in late winter to canning the finished product in early spring.