Welcome to brain Stuff from how stuff works dot com where smart Happens. Hi'm Marshall Brain with today's question, what is maple syrup and how do they make it? Maple syrup comes from the sap of maple trees. Yes, just the normal sap that's running underneath the bark in the early spring. If you cut the bark or drill a hole into certain species of maple trees, clear sap will leak out of the cut. This sap is very thin,
almost like water, but it contains about two sugar. If you boil this watery sap to drive off the water, you eventually get maple syrup. It takes thirty to forty gallons of sap to make one gallon of syrup. One tree might give you ten gallons of sap over the course of four weeks. The best days to collect sap are the days where the temperature is above freezing during the day and below freezing at night prior to bud formation. The sugar or rock maple and the black maple are
the two trees that give you the best syrup. Sometimes people also tapped the red maple before people collected the sap in buckets by drilling a hole into the tree and pounding in a wooden tube for the bucket to hang on. Today, most commercial operations use plastic taps and plastic tubing so the sap can flow to a central location. The sap is evaporated in large flat pans that are heated with wood, gas or electricity. Maple syrup is definitely
a northern thing to do. Maple syrup comes from places like Quebec and Ontario in Canada, and in the United States, it comes from Maine, Massachusetts, Michigan, New Hampshire, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Vermont, and Wisconsin. People in the north where it gets snowy and cold are the kind of people who have maple trees in their backyard. Do you have any ideas or suggestions for this podcast? If so, please send me an e mail at podcast at how stuff works dot com.
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