Hi everyone!
This is Brilliant Botany Episode 3, and I'm here today to talk to you about maple trees
and maple sugaring.
I actually wrote my undergraduate thesis on maple sugaring, so I can probably answer pretty
much any question you can come up with about maple sugaring.
And if you've been following me on tumblr for the last couple months, you might remember
I did maple question and answer series, and you can click on this annotation or I will
put the link in the description if you want to take a look at that.
Now, I could go into detail about the physiology and science of maple trees and maple sugaring
but that would take me quite a long time.
Basically, high pressure in the tree's vascular tissue-the network of tubes that moves water
through the plant-causes sap to be pushed out when you drill a hole in the tree's bark.
In sugaring, sap is typically taken from sugar maples or red maples, though it can be taken
from other species, it just doesn't have quite as high a sugar content.
This sap is collected and then boiled to remove water.
Sap starts out about 2-4% sugar, but finished maple syrup contains 67% sugar.
This means a lot of water has to be removed.
It takes 40 gallons of maple sap to produce one gallon of maple syrup.
All maple syrup is produced in the North Eastern United States and Canada.
The province of Quebec is responsible for about 80% of the world's maple syrup production
every year.
In 2011, a total of 13,075,000 gallons of maple syrup was produced in the US and Canada,
worth a staggering $470,568,000.
But why is maple syrup so valuable?
Well firstly, it takes a lot of work to produce.
A lot of energy has to go into boiling all of that sap to get all of that water out to
make syrup.
But also when colonists came to the United States, maple sugar was the only available
sweetener, short of importing cane sugar, which was very expensive.
So they learned the art of maple sugaring from the natives, and most families had a
sugarbush on their property to produce their own maple syrup and maple sugar.
Over the next few centuries, sugaring became a lucrative industry that we have today.
So those are the very bare basics of maple sugaring.
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