Maple Festival

We attended a Maple Festival today and it was very informative and tasty!

We were able to see maple trees that have been tapped with buckets hanging from them to collect the sap.

We were able to taste the sap right from the tree...it's basically water with a very slight hint of sweetness. A sugar maple tree produces sap with water content of 97% and 3% sugar. The sap from a silver maple, the type of maple tree you see lining the streets, are 0.5% sugar and 99.5% water. There is also a red maple that is 2.5% sugar but they're rarely tapped for making syrup as you would need much more sap to compensate for the 0.5% less sugar of a sugar maple tree.

We then watched as the tree sap was being boiled down to remove the water...this takes several days.



Here you can see the sap getting thicker. Ever wonder why pure maple syrup is so expensive to purchase? It takes 35 gallons of tree sap to make 1 gallon of maple syrup.

They were kind enough to make pancakes for sampling the maple syrup. This was the kids' favorite part, of course. The girls kept returning to the syrup table to get little cup of syrup, they weren't using the pancakes for tasting they were drinking straight from the cup. The volunteers serving the syrup finally caught on after 3 or 4 rounds and fortunately started denying them.