“Please sir, may I have more,” I tease as Carl pours each person on the tour a bit of maple sap.
The Hudson Highlands Nature Museum staff refer to themselves as edutainers. Carl, who led this maple syrup production tour from the tree to the table, has mastered the art of educating and entertaining while hiking.
We move and stop intermittently. It’s the way I like to hike when foraging or attracting wildlife. This museum really makes the natural world accessible to the general public.
This is the first winter of my life that there has been virtually no snow; the first significant accumulation had fallen just two days before this hike. But people who tap sugar maple trees in this area have already begun the process. In a normal winter, this would be the time to start.
It’s a short season - six weeks at most. Even with 21st Century technology, it’s a labor-intensive process. The result is worth the effort. If we happen to get a spring snow storm, I’ll be able to enjoy maple syrup on snow.
A few people my age, their children and grandchildren follow along, snapping icicles off branches, negotiating a snow-covered bridge and searching for dried sugar maple leaves. Carl delights in their discoveries. I marvel at how many details I didn’t know about this process.
I know that maple sap is 2% sugar and that it takes 40 gallons of sap to make one gallon of syrup. I didn’t know that each hole dries up and scars over. You have to drill a new hole each season. I asked Carl about this unusual winter.
“Last year was rough. Do you remember the warm January days? We had nothing.”
I know that holes are drilled into the south-facing sapwood on the lower trunks and and that tubes with spigots are inserted into the hole. I didn’t remember that they were called spiles. In the old days, a bucket and cover were hung from each spile. I know that you never take more than 10% of a tree’s sap, or you’ll kill the tree.
I did not know that New York State is the third largest producer of maple syrup. Vermont and Maine are first and second, respectively.
As we walked, Carl showed us how tubing has replaced the buckets, making the transport of sap to the evaporator pan less work. The syrup collects in a large pan, called an evaporator, which sits over a heating unit - a wood fire in the old days.
I know that if you’re making large volumes of maple syrup, you don’t want to do this on your kitchen stove-top, unless you plan to clean the sticky walls and ceiling.
In the old days, people used a candy thermometer and super-heated the sap to 219-degrees F. Now they use a hydrometer to measure the density of the syrup.
The tour ended with a taste test. I had no trouble figuring out which was maple syrup and which was maple-flavored corn syrup. We didn’t have corn syrup when I was growing up.
When I eat maple syrup, I taste sunlight, rain and a long, well-earned dormant period. Sugar maple trees symbolize New York, as well as New England, because the sweet sap and syrup have fed people for centuries. You boil the water away and eat the sticky stuff. No chemicals or other substances are added to change the flavor or texture.
Sugar maples are not symbolic of Virginia or Georgia for a reason. The climate is too warm. I wander off, with the taste of 2008 maple on my tongue and in my memory. I don’t know if our precious maple trees are threatened. I do know that production is down in most states in recent years.
Are my fellow attendees as impressed by maple sap and maple syrup as I am? I don’t know. But if we all care about the trees, then I have reason to hope that winter will return, allowing the trees to lie dormant and wake up refreshed in spring.